Five Gmail Labs Features We Need and 5 We Can Live Without

by Clint Boulton

Offline access to data is table stakes, particularly for users who want to access their Gmail from the skies during a flight.

These tools are vital for Gmail users who need them to ferret out contacts and other search terms in their cluttered in-boxes.

Integration with other Google Apps, such as Calendar and Docs (shown here), is a crucial feature for users, particularly those who work in Gmail.

We can’t tell you how much time we spent combing through e-mails repeatedly before this feature came into being.

The ability to add images to e-mail is particularly important at a time when words don’t always tell the whole story. You can’t explain a pie chart.

No one needs this many emoticon options.

A hoot for beer-swilling twenty-somethings, but no one wants to do math before sending e-mail. We feel the Undo Send tool is protection enough.

We can’t tell you exactly what is annoying about this feature, but it grates on the nerves. When your in-box loads, the contents flash for a quick 2 seconds or so, but not long enough to glean any useful information. Must be an attention-grabbing tactic.

Not as bad as Mail Goggles, but still. If you have to have stock responses to contacts, maybe you need your e-mail automatically generated.

Even if it renders us invisible in chat, when we use this feature, we can still see the screen in the background, so it’s not exactly hiding much.