Anyone who has ever tried to use Gmail as a central hub for their Email has likely fallen prey to one of the service’s annoying flaws: there was no way to use another site’s outgoing SMTP servers to send Email. For the vast majority of people this wasn’t an issue — Gmail was happy to send your Email for you from your Gmail account, along with message indicating that it was being sent “On Behalf Of” your other account. But those three words were still there, serving as a constant thorn in our sides. And to make matters worse, it could also confuse people: they might start sending messages to your Gmail account rather than your primary Email address. Today, you can kiss those “On Behalf Of”’s goodbye, as Gmail has just started allowing users to send their messages from third party SMTP servers.

If the previous paragraph confused you, here’s an explanation: Many people like to use Gmail’s web interface for their Email but don’t have the option of using Google Apps on their mail server, especially when it’s for their work account.

We’ve been covering the new web email project MySpace has been working on in stealth mode for the past several month. Now it’s ready to begin a quiet rollout today, in beta, for users around the globe.

Here’s why this matters: Right off the bat, MySpace Mail with a sexy new interface is a major player in the e-mail space based on sheer size alone. With nearly 130 million global users, it will enter the field as the 4th largest email provider in the world, and 2nd largest in the U.S. And it’s being built on top of the MySpace Messaging service that plenty of people are already using a lot — it accounts for some 20% of MySpace’s site traffic, we’re told.

Here’s what else is nice: Because MySpace has had so-called vanity URLs since its inception (unlike Facebook, which just rolled out the feature), you can use those as your email address with the new MySpace Mail. So for a page that resides at myspace.com/techcrunch, the email would be techcrunch@myspace.com, for example. And, if you don’t like the vanity URL you currently have, MySpace is giving you the opportunity to change it to something else (assuming it’s available). This would also change your vanity URL for your profile.

Google is finally figuring out that short links are just easier to deal with, especially on a mobile phone. No, it is not rolling out its own URL shortening service just yet (bit.ly, stand down). But today it is introducing what it calls “smart links” to the mobile version of Gmail.

When it recognizes a super-long link like one for Google Maps, it will shorten it to the underlying name thing being linked to. In this case, it is an address.

When it comes to email, less is more. So I applaud Gmail’s efforts to try to reduce all the unwanted emails in my inbox. Its latest attempt to make it easier to unsubscribe from unwanted email newsletters is well-intentioned, but falls flat on its face in its current form. When you report a newsletter as spam, you may now see the notification box above asking you if you want to automagically unsubscribe as well. You would click “Unsubscribe and report as spam” and Gmail will unsubscribe for you.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that is because it is. First of all, it only works for messages which include a “List-Unsusbcribe” header in the email with an accompanying “mailto” URL. No self-respecting spammer would include those. But wait, it gets worse. The feature is purposely not activated for known spammers.

Since we wrote the story last week about GPush, the iPhone app that delivers Gmail messages through iPhone Push Notifications, we’ve gotten numerous emails with the same question: Where can I get it? Unfortunately, as I said in the post, it looks like Apple is dragging its feet in accepting the app. So today, we bring news of a potential workaround. Yes, a workaround for a workaround.

After reading our post, Developer Harry Finocchiaro created a simple application called “Gmailpush” and uploaded it to Google Code for all to use. What is does is checks your Gmail account for new messages and then sends you a text message alert when a new one comes in. Is this ideal? No. But depending on how fast it works (I haven’t tried it out yet), it is a potential workaround for those who really want push Gmail on the iPhone.

You’d think on a phone that can do as many cool things as the iPhone, push email through one of the world’s most popular email services, Gmail, would be one of them. But for some reason, Google and Apple haven’t turned on the functionality for Gmail accounts on the iPhone. Sure, you can get push email through MobileMe, Yahoo Mail or Exchange, but basic Gmail users are basically out of luck. Until now, maybe.

Let me be clear, I’m still not certain that this app will even be approved for the App Store. But if it is, it’s pretty awesome.

It’s called GPush; it’s a very simple app that uses the new Push Notifications in the iPhone 3.0 software to ping your iPhone every time a new message comes in. Yes, not only is it push Gmail, it gives you Gmail with notifications. While you might think that could be annoying, it actually works quite well.

Gmail is constantly adding features to help people become more organized. Today, Google has tweaked its Labels feature to add more functionality to the labels toolkit, helping users implement labels in a more organized way. Your labels will now be located in a new area on your Gmail interface, above your chat list and grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels. You can also now control which labels you’d like to show on your UI and you can hide the rest under a “more” tab.

Of of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.

A lot of people complain about Gmail not having a native application on the iPhone. While it’s not clear if Apple will even allow that yet with the new iPhone 3.0 SDK, one thing that is becoming more clear: Soon it won’t need one.

The reason is that its iPhone-optimized mobile version continues to get some killer features. The latest is the ability to use the swipe gesture to archive messages — yes, within the browser. Users of the iPhone’s native mail app will recognize and appreciate this functionality (though in that app it’s used to delete messages, not archive them).

Gmail is far and away the best online email management system out there right now. But a lot of people still use it like a regular email service, never touching some of its power-features that can really help with email overload. So Google launched a new Tips area of the site today to serve as a reference point for how to become what it calls a “Gmail Ninja.”

It breaks the tips down into “White belt,” “Green belt,” “Black belt,” and “Gmail master,” based on your level of expertise. While the White and Green belt stuff is mostly for neophytes, there are some good tips in there that you may have forgotten along the way while using Gmail. The later belts are the ones that contain some of the good stuff though, particularly some of the big keyboard and search shortcuts, that I always forget to use.

Google has a post today on its blog outlining how many of its applications are built right into the Palm Pre’s webOS. That’s hardly surprising given that it’s an OS built around the web technologies Google knows and loves: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But buried in the post is a little nugget of information that is sure to enrage some iPhone owners: The Pre will support push Gmail from the get-go.

Push technology allows an email to come to your phone without the user having to specifically call up to the server to get it (known as “pull”). This means near instantaneous receipt of messages as opposed to your phone being set to check for new messages at set intervals, which is how Gmail configured through the iPhone’s mail client currently works. Push Gmail has been rumored for a little while. But now it looks like Google is ready to tout it.

Gmail has always offered an odd mixture of lightning fast AJAX navigation and frustratingly slow load times, depending on what you’re doing. The worst offender, by far, is the initial load when you first open the page – sometimes the loading bar flashes by in a second, others it chooses to sluggishly crawl without any apparent intention of ever finishing. If you find yourself seeing the latter all too often, then you’re going to be quite pleased with a new Gmail Labs feature that just launched called Gmail Inbox Preview.

Inbox Preview does one very basic thing: as Gmail goes through its initial boot, it shows a plaintext version of your ten most recent message subject lines. You can’t open the messages or interact with them in any way, but it will let you quickly tell if you’ve got any new messages without having to sit through the load time. Most people on high speed internet connections probably won’t even notice the feature, but for those of us who reguarlly have to check our Email using quirky mobile connections or dial up service, it’s sure to come in handy.

One almost surefire way to find if a new feature is on the verge of launching is to dig through code. That’s exactly what led to finding a reference to something called “Magic Inbox,” in Gmail. But what is it? Well, it could just be another one of those nifty, but small new features that Google loves to roll out in Gmail Labs at breakneck speed. But there’s a chance it’s something much, much bigger.

Specifically, Google Operating System, which did the digging, believes that the feature likely is a way to sort your Gmail inbox by your social graph. The two references to “friends” in the code, seems to lend some credence to this. Presumably, this would allow you to better filter your inbox based on if you have specified the emailer as a contact. As someone who gets bombarded by email everyday, most of which is not from people I actually know, I would weep with joy if such a feature were implemented. And so would my mom, as she may actually get emails back from me were that the case.

Gmail Labs just added another nifty tool to its suite of features—message translation. Using Google Translate, Gmail will help you translate any message that you receive in another language into a language you can understand. The feature can be used for 41 languages.

Gmail will suggest a language to translate the message to and also gives you the option to translate the message to different language.

If your email conversation includes Gmail users, you can have entire conversation in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them.

Since launching back in 2004, Gmail has set the gold standard for webmail clients, offering a large amount of storage and a highly usable interface, free of charge. But for many people it has remained out of reach – no matter how appealing Gmail might be, they’ve racked up thousands of messages on other services that they simply can’t give up. Today, that changes. Gmail just released a new feature that allows users to import their Email archives and contacts into their Gmail accounts effortlessly.

The new feature, which is being powered by TrueSwitch, supports importing from all of the usual suspects, including AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and dozens of others (you can find a whole list here). To start with it is only enabled on new accounts, with support for existing accounts being added over time (Google warns that this roll-out will be considerably slower than normal). You can also optionally choose to import messages sent to your old account for up to thirty days.

Since Gmail’s birth in 2004, Google has steadily built a powerful cloud-based email platform that’s chock full of innovative features including offline access, chat, search, mobile access and more. Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Today, Google announced that it has struck a partnership with Valeo, an automotive components manufacturer, to deploy Google Apps on the company’s entire global workforce, which totals about 30,000 internet-using employees.

I can’t stop drooling over Gmail Labs. It’s simply a great idea for expanding a product, without forcing all users happy with the current one to upgrade to features they don’t want. And tonight may be the best Gmail Labs feature yet: Google Search In Gmail.

Yes, it may sound lame or obvious, but it’s a pretty kickass feature. Once enabled, it puts a Google Search widget in the left side toolbar of Gmail. From there, you simply input a query into the search box, and it will pop up the results in an overlay window at the bottom — the same type of window it users for IMs and Tasks. It will show you the top three results in this box automatically, or you can click “more” to expand the box. You can also pop the results out into their own window.

You’ve likely already seen it, but it’s still a little unbelievable to me that Gmail included feces as one of its emoticons. If you haven’t seen it, go ahead, check it out, it’s there (the very last one on the bottom row). And now, we’re getting more emoticons — a whole hell of a lot more.

A new feature in Gmail Labs, Extra Emoji, adds dozens of these different colorful icons as possibilities to send via Gmail. Emoji is the Japanese term used for emoticons, which are hugely popular in that country. So much so that support for them was added to only the Japanese version of the iPhone. And it’s the Japanese who actually made this Gmail Labs feature as well. Specifically, “all of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission,” Google writes on its blog.

We’ll say it right off the bat: what the hell took Microsoft so long? Years after Yahoo and Google integrated web IM features into their free webmail services (Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail and Gtalk in Gmail, respectively), Redmond is finally enabling users to log into their Hotmail accounts and converse with their contacts over instant messaging directly without the need to log on to Windows Live Messenger separately, or to even have the program installed altogether.

The new feature will be gradually rolled out, starting from today enabling subsets of users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA to send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages. The feature earlier rolled out to some users users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK.

Gmail Labs continues to make an awesome product even better. Tonight the site has introduced ‘Sender time zone’, a feature that allows users to quickly tell if their contact is likely awake or sound asleep, based on the time zone their Emails are being sent from.

The feature takes advantage of the time zone data often included in Email headers, showing a green light for contacts that are probably awake and a red one for those that are asleep.

For those of us who live and die by our inboxes, it can be tough to keep track of the contacts that are abroad, which can lead to some awkward phone calls (I’ve accidentally called CEOs of startups located in the UK at around 4 in the morning, their time). The feature is also helpful for determining how quickly you can expect an Emailed response from your contact (again, I’ve sent urgent messages to PR representatives who were based abroad).

As with all Google Labs features (other notables include a Panic Button and Multi-Pane Viewing) users can access the feature by enabling Google Labs through their Gmail settings, then selecting ‘Sender Time Zone’.

Google has launched a new Gmail mobile web app for the iPhone and Android-powered devices. The app has been revamped to have the same look and feel as your desktop Gmail. The app also has a new floaty bar (more on that below) and offers basic offline support.

Google says that the app is faster in performing actions like opening an email, navigating, or searching, and let’s you access your Gmail messages even if your network connection is flaky. All of these new features are enabled through leveraging Google’s browser technologies, especially HTML5 and Google Gears. Google has recently demoed the app at industry conferences, but Google engineer Joanne McKinley writes on the Google Mobile blog: