A year ago, Gmail was updated to provide a new interface. The Better Gmail add-on for Firefox was updated to support this new interface. Then Gmail Labs began providing new experimental features. Who can keep it all straight?

Like the dog in Devo's song "Freedom of Choice", sometimes we are faced with too many choices. The plethora of options available for Gmail users may be a prime example of this.

Gmail has always been a leading-edge (if not bleeding-edge) interface for dealing with email. It was one of the earliest email interfaces to use AJAX heavily. Following the Google paradigm of "search, don't sort", you don't put email items into folders, you give them labels (not unlike tags for blog posts). This falls inline with the non-hierarchical paradigm that says things don't necessarily belong to one category, or have a single position in a complex hierarchy. You can attach multiple labels to an email and you can search for it using either label (or both).

Gmail also displays your email not as individual messages but as conversations. An exchange between you and another person (or group of people) having the same Subject line shows up as one line item in Gmail. While other services give you a "threaded" mode as an option, with Gmail it's not just a default, it's the way you view email. This is something you either love or hate (sometimes both).

The point of all this being that Gmail is an acquired taste, but once you've acquired that taste, customizing Gmail the way you want it to work becomes an obsession. And Gmail stepped up from the start with tools to do that customization. A flexible filtering system that can label, forward, or trash messages based on the From address, To address, subject or body content. The ability to gather messages from other POP and IMAP accounts, both to read them using the Gmail interface and to respond to them using the addresses associated with those other accounts.

Clearly, though, this was not enough. Gmail users wanted more. And they got it. Sometimes from the people at Google, sometimes not.

People began writing Greasemonkey scripts that extended the capabilities of Gmail for Firefox users. Gina Trapani, editor of the Lifehacker blog, compiled the best of them into a packaged Firefox extension called Better Gmail. Then in late 2007, Gmail announced an updated version of their interface, and Better Gmail and the scripts it includes were updated to work with that new interface. In the meantime, Google has continued to add new capabilities to Gmail, many made available as experimental features through Gmail Labs (including the one that supposedly prevented "inebriated emailing"). Most recently Gmail added one more bit of functionality, themes.

With functionality available from such a wide variety of sources, conflicts and confusion are sure to arise.

  • For example, Better Gmail offers "skins", but be careful using them if you select one of Gmail's new themes. I had to disable the Better Gmail skins function in order to prevent my selected Gmail theme from looking all messed up.
  • Similarly, Gmail now provides a Settings option that forces your browser to always connect to Gmail via a secure (https) connection. (A great idea, by the way, especially if you plan to connect from public wi-fi spots.) Better Gmail also provides this option. You should only need to enable it in one place. Presumably Gmail's Settings panel is the better place.
  • Gmail Labs provides a calendar widget that displays a summary of your Google Calendar entries in a small box in your Gmail sidebar. But Better Gmail provides the ability to display complete email, calendar, and Google Reader content as collapsible panels stacked vertically in the Gmail window. The latter approach displays the full calendar (day, week, or month view), but I've found that when using two-finger scrolling on my MacBook to move down the page to view the calendar content, the day/week/month being displayed is advanced simultaneously. It's easy enough to click the Calendar link at the top of the page to switch over to viewing your Google Calendar, so you may want to use this with discretion.

Between native Gmail features, Better Gmail functions, and Gmail Labs magic, these are the pieces I use:

Settings : General : Browser Connection
At the bottom of this panel, select the "Always Use Https" option to make sure your browser always opens Gmail using a secure connection. Setting this option here in this panel is better than the "Force Encrypted Connection" option in Better Gmail, because the former establishes this setting for all browsers on all computers you may connect to Gmail from, not just for Firefox on this computer.
Settings : Accounts
From this panel, I configure Gmail to retrieve POP mail from other accounts (including an old AOL account we rarely use anymore). I also use the "Send Mail As" feature so I can send or respond to messages using a "From" address associated with my personal domain (as well as that old AOL address). This means I can read and respond to all my mail in one place. (If you're going to use Gmail to send mail from multiple addresses, it's a good idea to enable the "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" option.)
Settings : Labels and Settings : Filters
Labels give you a way to categorize and organize messages. Filters set things up so that the right labels are applied to them automatically as they arrive in your inbox.
Better Gmail : Folders4Gmail
Yes, I know I said that Labels are not folders, but if you happened to have serendipitously set up "hierarchical" labels (e.g., "SHOPPING/BOOKS" and "SHOPPING/CLOTHES"), Better Gmail's Folders4Gmail feature will present these multi-layered labels as collapsible entries in a hierarchical tree.
Gmail Labs : Forgotten Attachment Detector
In the spirit of "inebriated email" prevention, this feature looks at the text of the email you're about to send, and if words like "I'm attaching a file" are present in the text but you haven't actually attached a file, Gmail prompts you with a warning message. This has come to my rescue too many times to mention.
Gmail Labs : Advanced IMAP Controls
Labels are not folders, labels are not folders, labels are not folders... well, OK, it turns out that if you access Gmail using IMAP via an external email client, you'll find that your labels actually are represented as folders. (Messages having more than one label appear in each corresponding folder, although Gmail maintains only one copy of the message.) If perchance you don't want all of your defined labels to show up when using IMAP to access Gmail (e.g., on a wireless device like an iPhone or Blackberry), enable this option and you can choose which ones appear. (Of course, make sure IMAP Access is enabled in the Forwarding and POP/IMAP panel.)
Settings : General : Keyboard Shortcuts
Turn this option on to enable keyboard shortcuts that let you take action with a single keystroke (e.g., "r" to reply, "g" to go to a specific label, "c" to compose a new message, "*" to select messages). Gmail Labs also offers a feature to customize your keyboard shortcuts.
Better Gmail other options
  • General - "Show Collapsible Calendar and Reader" is the previously mentioned method of displaying email, calendar, and Google Reader content as vertically stacked collapsible panels
  • Messages - "Show Row Highlights", as the name implies, highlights the currently selected row, while "Attachment Icons" includes an icon representing a particular kind of attached file (Word document, PDF, zip file, etc.) included in a message.
  • Compose - Includes a variety of options for automatically displaying an editable subject, Cc, and Bcc line when composing an email.

Again, the one thing worth avoiding is using Better Gmail's skins with Gmail's themes. Choose one or the other.