5 Favorite Gmail Add-Ons
Maybe you already love Gmail from Google. But are you taking advantage of the free add-ons in Gmail Labs that turn this Web-based e-mail service from good to great? Here's a look at five favorites.
How to set it up: Go to Gmail Labs, click "enable," and save. Doing No Good: Unfortunately, this detector doesn't always work. In fact, I only got it to work on two of five attempts using pretty obvious diction in the body of the e-mail. There's a lot of discussion in the Gmail Labs
3. E-Mail Addict
How it helps do no evil: We spend too much time in e-mail. With e-mail addict, once an hour your e-mail will shut down, asking you to "take a break" and you will become invisible on Google Chat for 15 minutes.
How to set it up: Go to Gmail Labs, click "enable" and save.
Doing no good: If your boss sends you a very important e-mail during that time period, you may not be happy camper. But odds are, your boss has other ways of getting in touch with you, and I find very little wrong with people who decide to enable this add-on. Again, we spend WAY too much time in e-mail.
4. Google Docs Gadget
How it helps do no evil: While some of you might say "pry my Microsoft Office from my cold dead hands," the Google Apps developers have spent a lot of time during the past year building upon their Web-based Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations apps.
While each still lacks some of the features in Office, Google Docs has some upsides. Mainly, it doesn't require that you store files locally (so if you lose your laptop, you're only out the hardware, not the files). It also has amazing version control. If you liked how a document looked 20 minutes ago, you can revert back.
For the full web-based version of Google Docs, you've typically needed to click on the "Documents" link in the top left side of Gmail, launching a new tab in your browser. Now, with this Google Docs Gadget, you can see your recent documents as a widget beside your Gmail inbox. It has a "new" tab that immediately allows you to begin a new document, spreadsheet, presentation or form writer.
How it works: Go to Gmail Labs, click enable, and save. The widget will appear on left column of your Gmail page.
Doing No Good: The document list in the widget doesn't always update very quickly after you add new documents. I can deal with this, but it'd be nice to have some sort of "refresh" button to force the issue if I wanted.
