Category: Gmail

Last month I posted about the new Gmail experience going GA (General Availability) for G Suite users with the option for Admins to move their users to the new experience or to keep the classic look for a bit longer.  That GA event has now happened and Admins can have the option for users to move to the new experience now or later.

In the blog post Google made about it today, Admins basically have three options available to users ranging from opting-in now on the new experience to delaying it until September.

The latest update to Gmail for Android is making its way out to the Play Store and it brings a new Tip setting for users.  The new build is version 8.6 for those keeping score at home and when you get the update, you will have a new Inbox Tip inside settings for your Gmail account.

The setting is enabled by default and when you tap it, you see the Unsubscribe tips.  With this turned on, you will get occasional tips to unsubscribe to bulk email that you rarely read.

Google has notified G Suite domain admins of when the new Gmail experience will begin rolling out when it goes to General Availability (GA) next month.  Currently, for G Suite, the new Gmail experience is in the Early Adopters Program and organizations can chose to participate in the program – or not.  This is the same for consumer too, but that will be changing when the experience goes GA in July.

Once the new experience goes GA, admins will have the option to switch everyone over immediately, allow users to switch themselves, or have users wait four weeks before they are opted into the new experience.  The latter of these will be the default behavior.

After debuting on the new Gmail experience on the web, nudges has landed in Gmail for Android too.  The feature gives you suggested reminders to follow up on emails or to reply to emails that are in your Gmail inbox.  The feature is a cloud-side update so as long as you are running the latest build of Gmail on your Android phone, you should see the feature.

Nudges in Gmail uses AI to survey your inbox and give you gentle reminders (aka nudges) to reply to an email or to follow up on an email.  The idea is to help you with a reminder so you don’t have something you need to follow up on slip through the cracks.

While Google I/O was going on yesterday, the Gmail team announced a new feature that you may have missed.  If you are using the new Gmail experience and Chrome as your browser, you can now configure the mail service to work offline in the browser.

In Settings, there is now a new Offline tab where you can configure things.  You can select the amount of time you want stored locally – 30, 60, 90 days – and then configure the security settings on what to do if you sign out of Chrome.  Save the settings and now you can work offline in Gmail while you are on that flight or elsewhere that WiFi isn’t available.

Among the many announcements at Google I/O yesterday, there was one that may have slipped by:  Gmail and its new Smart Compose feature.  Rolling out to all Gmail customers in the coming weeks, Smart Compose uses Artificial Intelligence to look at the content of your message as well as your writing style to provide suggested text for your email.  This is way beyond auto completing of words.  Smart Compose can provide complete sentences which can be put into your email with a single tap of the spacebar.

Smart Compose helps save you time by cutting back on repetitive writing, while reducing the chance of spelling and grammatical errors. It can even suggest relevant contextual phrases. For example, if it’s Friday it may suggest “Have a great weekend!” as a closing phrase.

This another great example of how Google is leveraging AI to complete time consuming but basic tasks in our day-to-day lives.