Tag: Google Gmail

Gmail language search

Via Google Blogoscoped post I learned it is possible to search for messages in Gmail based on what language they are written in.  The operator is called “lang” and can be used like so:   “lang:ru“  or “lang:russian“.  The operator can be used both in regular searches and in filter conditions.   As noted in the comments, this might be useful for sorting out spam messages (label with “Spam“) written in languages that you don’t understand (Chinese, for example, – “lang:zh“).

For me personally, this comes very useful, since most of my friends and family (at least those with who I communicate via email) speak both Russian and English, and sometimes it takes too much time going through all the messages instead of picking just those in one language (for those cases when I remember the language).

My new Gmail

Finally, my prayers have been heard and my Gmail account was upgraded to the newer version.  It is as sweet as was promised.  Message pre-loading makes sorting through mail in morning extremely fast.  New contact manager is indeed much better than the old, dare I say, address book.   It still misses a few things, like fields for URLs.

Now I’m waiting for all those Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that I use to beautify and customize Gmail to get updated and work with the new version.

The 20% rule

Sidenote: it seems this is the third post for today, and the third one that is somehow related to Google. This is not intentional.

It’s a wide known fact that Google allows (or, depending on how you look at it, forces) its employees to  work 20% of the time on the side projects.  What kind of projects?  What do they actually do?  Where this time goes?  Here is an idea from the hilarious article at Cracked.com:

Google engineers are given “20 percent time” in which they are free to pursue their own personal projects. This incentive has produced such efforts as Gmail, Google News, and 20% more employee masturbation.

Looking forward for new Gmail

Mashable mentions that a new Gmail is coming. And I’m eagerly waiting for the new version, because I really, really want these changes:

One of the features is pre-fetching of messages. This means that when you load a page that has a list of messages, Gmail will fetch them in advance, so that they will be available immediately, when you decide to click on one. This goes along with the new JavaScript architecture that’s expected to bring improved performance. There will also be a new contact manager, which will be shared with other Google Apps, including Docs and Calendar.

More Gmail space?

Today I noticed that I have more Gmail space than I used. Here is a screenshot:

Gmail space stats

I don’t check these numbers every day, but I was under the impression that I had somewhere around 3 GBytes just a few days ago. Now I have more than 4 GBytes. I looked through a few news sites, but haven’t noticed any related headlines.

Anybody has any idea? Is it for everybody or just a few random users? Will it stay or will it go? Will we get more? (as you can clearly see, I don’t need more just yet, but I’m still interested).