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Despite Outage, Google Makes More Tweaks To Gmail

Even though Gmail crashed for several hours earlier this week, Google is moving forward with its continual roll out of new features for its e-mail product. This week, Gmail adds the ability to change the tab label for Gmail, as well as add multiple attachments at once.

The new capabilities of Gmail aren't as earth-shattering as offline access, but they can be helpful for the busy Web mail user. The first modification comes through Gmail Labs.

Fëdor Karpelevitch, software engineer, writes, "I'm often doing something on my computer and want to know if I have new mail without having to keep my Gmail window open. But if you keep Gmail minimized or in an inactive tab sometimes all you see in the browser title bar is something like 'Gmail - Inbo...'"

As I write this post in Google Docs, I have Gmail open in another tab. "Gmail - Inbo..." is exactly what I see right now as the name of that tab (I generally have 10 or more tabs open at a time). The problem is, I can't see if I have any new e-mails by glancing quickly at the Gmail tab. To help out, Karpelevitch added a new feature to Labs called Title Tweak. It lets you change the order of elements so you can see your unread e-mail count no matter how small the tab gets. For those who want/need to see if they have any unread e-mails but don't want to switch out of their current tab, this is a helpful addition.

The other change will probably please more people. When using the Web mail version of Gmail, adding multiple attachments was a bit of a pain. You have to go in and add each one manually, which could be tedious if you needed to add a moderate number of attachments. No longer.

Wes Carr, software engineer, writes, "If you want to send a few files from the same folder, simply hold down the Ctrl key (Cmd on OS X) and click on each file you want to attach to your message. You can also hold down the Shift key to select a continuous list of files. A definite time saver."

He's right. I tested it out this morning. Being able to send multiple attachments from the same folder makes composing e-mails a lot less painful.

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