Gmail made a tweak last night that brings better contact management to the service. When you click the “To:” or “CC:” links in front of each address field, a box pops up with your contact list. (See example at right). It is a simple change, but it saves you from having to go to another page to find a contact.
Most of the time, Gmail users probably won’t use this feature because Gmail already gives you a list of auto-complete suggestions as you begin typing in a name into the “To:” field. These are based on people you’ve communicated with recently, and usually does the trick. But if you haven’t emailed someone for a long time, their name doesn’t pop up. It also doesn’t help if you can’t remember their name.
Anything that reduces the amount of steps it takes to complete an email is a plus in my book. However, this feature is a bit hidden. You have to click on the “To” or “CC” links to expose it, something many people might only do by mistake the first time (which is why I’m telling you).
The contact chooser also works for groups.
Nice hint, but I don´t use GMAil anymore, this whole Google reign is scarin me a little of. I have to admit that all these Google features are pretty useful and if you use some google services (I use Youtube and GoogleAnalytics ) come in very handy. They got the exclusive right to information and I don´t want them to have that on my Mails. But some EMail services really could gear themselves to this usabillity of GMail.
Some points to consider:
1. Any email service you use has access to the information you say you are trying to hide.
2. We as individuals are probably not important/interesting enough for email providers to risk the consequences pilfering our individual inboxes. This is especially true for companies with high visibility and accountability, like Google.
So you host your own mail server and never email anyone not also using their own mail server?
I fail to see your point here.
Conratulations. Yahoo and Hotmail have had this feature forever. This is news because?
Because it’s ‘new’ (for Gmail). And that’s what news is all about!
Yeah, and Yahoo and Hotmail are for cavemen
The functionality of popping up the contact list and recent ids used are available in other mail services. But it is good that Gmail has extended the feature right now.
Terrific little enhancement that I honestly can’t believe took them this long to make.
Good to see GMail adding features like this. Their contact management definitely needed some help. Now all we need is exchange support for Mail.
Starting to use Gmail more and more as my central online portal…
I have and tried them all. I swear by Gmail now for all business and personal emails. This article has made things so simple and made me so more efficient.
http://putthing...m/inbox-heaven/
Where’s my “don’t add everyone I e-mail to my contacts” feature? Or my “don’t sync the All Contacts group and put 50 Craigslist addresses on my phone”? Or how about “Reply All should maintain the To: and CC: lists of the original message instead of putting everyone in CC”? I love my GMail, but their contact system is terrible.
I am missing this functionality, was this a limited release? I am on Chrome too….
You will have to click over the hyperlink “To” to open the popup.
A minor tweak, a major leap.
Nice feature!
wow! what a cool addition I can’t believe my eyes. So now for you Erick this has become a news. Are you guys run out of industry news that you guys actually putting all these tweaks, bug fixes and all little n usual changes as your news.
U should make a news like this.
“Welcome to the stream. Gmail adds To and CC popups finally.”
And do add this content to your post.
“Gmail is making its contact management more easy by by adding To and CC popups in much the same way that Yahoo! and Hotmail added this feature some lifetime ago. (That’s right, Yahoo! and Hotmail beat Gmail to this feature set by more than a lifetime).”
Remember something Erick.
You guys just suck.
^^Troll^^
Shonu – why didn’t you include your website, twitter and/or email when you wrote this post?
Weak sauce…
I wish they used some type of floating window instead of a new pop up window…
And ohhhhh I forgot in Gmail you need to open a new page to go to your contact if you are in between writing a mail.
They still don’t have tabs… oooo poor baby
Yahoo! added social feature to mail. No other mail has that till now. Its a major and a very big change to any mail and you made a news like this
“When you are late to the game, trying to rename it doesn’t win you any points.”
How much they are paying to you?
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Go jump in lake. If you hate TC so much their is no need to be here.
I don’t hate TC but I hate their biased attitude towards some of the company like Yahoo! and Microsoft… I know very well what I am talking about.
You should read their earlier posts.
Yahoo mail? Oh right, that’s the one with the terrible spam filter.
duhhh… Gmail spam filter is also a bought one. But true its probably one of the best in the market.
Looks like someone has a microchip on their shoulder.
this looks cool
please check the javascript of this site in opera and support cross browser.
This is a great new feature, I love it!
Indeed it looks more like a bug fix then that it’s a great new feature, but I’m glad you posted it as I didn’t notice it yet in my Gmail.
great feature! http://www.sizl...e.blogspot.com/
I noticed that this morning when answering emails was like… was this always here? It’s very subtle so I couldn’t be sure. But I guess it is new.
Yeah it’s handy… it’s too bad they didn’t make it a layered DIV – I don’t like that it opens a new window! Oh well, still handy…
Yahoo already offers a similar feature for quite some time now.
Probably done to satisfy enterprise users (GA).
They’ve got people switching – good, but still using software clients – bad.
Side Note: Is it me, or does TC change comments every week? Should i Fconnect, Tconnect, fill in stuff? There’s a meebo bar down there?
is it me or the meebo bar blends perfectly with chrome, I thought it was an addon or something at first
This will become fresh news again when they stick ‘compose email’ on the contact page!
It’ll be like a whole new era of integration!
Never knew abt this feature until i read this article, even though i’ve been using gmail for ages. Seems like this update of theirs didn’t catch my (and many other’s) attention after all!
This is great, now its much easier to find my email contacts (bye bye outlook)