You can see the little handles on each message line on the far left side of the message. You can then drag the message on top of the label you want to apply to the message. Not the major improvement from their perspective, but I really like the fact they moved the labels up to be positioned right under the standard groupings of messages.

The one thing I’m not sure how I like yet, is that when I drag a message onto one of the labels it immediately archives the message out of my Inbox. I frequently will add labels to messages but leave them in the Inbox. That may take some getting adjusted to.

Post from: EveryJoe

Google’s Gmail Changes and Adds Functionality

I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into my email and noticed messages with a weird date and time. In my opinion if an email is sent to me with a "Sent On" date prior to the Pony Express being in service, it’s more than likely a spam email. Even if it’s a legitimate email from a reliable source, I probably don’t want to see it. When they realize I’m not getting their emails or responding, then we can talk about fixing their time server on their computers.

The same would be true for any date where "Sent On" is in the future of the current date. To me those are obvious issues and could be deleted at the server level. Anyone else agree with me here?

I know you can’t clump emails sent in the wee hours of the morning as always spam, I believe they are frequently from senders you may not want to see. Perhaps these could immediately be tagged as junk and kept for review. In fact, I think some email servers already do this as a first level trigger of potential spam sources.

Post from: EveryJoe

Why Can’t Easy Filters Catch Spam

You can go to the Gmail Help files and read through a variety of tips to make you a ninja of Gmail usage. The tips are divided into the four different levels.

1. White belt
2. Green belt
3. Black belt
4. Gmail master

Through each section they have pretty much covered just about any other tip I can think of for how I use it. Many of the tips involve using features that are available from the Google Labs functionality. There are a number of nice additions you can incorporate into Gmail to improve and enhance the functionality.

What tips do you have that you’d like to share? I do still wish I could sort by subject and other columns in Gmail.

Post from: EveryJoe

Are You a Gmail Ninja

The challenge I saw with the first version I tried was that it seemed to significantly slow down the processing and open and closing of Outlook.

The new version I’ve been playing with now seems to be going a bit faster and they’ve continued to add new features. They used to only connect with LinkedIn to find out more information about your contacts. Now they also help you find your contacts profiles on Skype and Facebook and company information on Hoovers. Xobni also can integrate with your Yahoo! Mail address as well.

In a nutshell Xobni, which is "Inbox" spelled backwards if you hadn’t figured it out, allows you to quickly search for contacts and see a history and conversational listing of all contact with that person. Combining that information with the other profile information that’s now available from the other systems as mentioned above helps puts you on top of your email Inbox.

The other interesting feature of Xobni is to smash some analytics onto your email and start finding out about your emailing patterns and other details.

Instead of grabbing a bunch of screen shots from my installation, visit the Xobni website’s Learn More section for the different screens that are available. As I said, loads of information with Xobni.

Post from: EveryJoe

Trying Xobni Again with Outlook