Gmail

Don't you love it when the most obvious solution to a problem is right in front of your face? I recently had to search through my nearly 30,000 Gmail messages to find a message with a specific date, and a general search wasn't returning the result I was looking for.

With a little help from friends on Twitter, I discovered the "Show Search Options" link to the right of the Gmail search bar. Clicking it reveals a host of helpful options, including the ability to search by sender, date, attachment, subject, and more. It's extremely helpful if you (like me) are less than diligent about labeling and filing emails in your inbox — I just used it to find all of the family photos my mom has ever sent.

This weekend was not pretty for me — I lost my iPhone. Now that the initial panic has subsided, and the pangs of withdrawal are gone, I'm doing OK. I'm getting a new iPhone next week, and unlike my landline- and voicemail-only days, not having a cell phone doesn't mean lugging a roll of quarters and an address book around. Besides email, here's how I'm staying connected:

• Gmail's "Call Phone" feature — Being able to make phone calls from my Gmail account is pretty amazing. The desktop VoIP client is free when calling any number in the United States and super easy to use. You just dial the number on a pop-up keypad and talk right into your computer. I've ordered food delivery, called a cab, and confirmed appointments using the Call Phone feature.
• Video chat — Whether it's Skype or Gmail, I've been all about using video chat this week to call my friends, which is something I've never really done on the regular. This is especially cool when I'm video chatting with a friend who only lives a few blocks away. In the past, I would have just texted and lost out on the face-to-face time that video chat provides.

See what else I'm using after the break.

Since I generally keep my Gmail window open for much of the day, checking for new messages is like muscle memory. The downside: sometimes I do it way too often. Two new just-released tools from Google provide fast and easy access to new and unread messages.

If you, like me, tend to leave at ton of browser tabs open, you'll love the latest Gmail Labs release. The new unread message icon is a tiny number that displays directly over the Gmail icon in your browser tab displaying the number of unread messages in your inbox. It's not unlike the number in parentheses that typically displays on the browser tab, but that number can sometimes get hidden if you have many open tabs. To turn it on, go to the Labs tab in settings, enable it, and click save. This lab is only available in Chrome and Firefox.

Check out the second notification feature (that works for Gchat, too!) after the break.

Back in college I studied abroad for a year, and even now, I still keep in touch with my closest friends from my time overseas. But I love is how keeping in touch has evolved over the years: we started out with the occasional email, phone card call, or online chat (or surprise pen pal letter!), but now even people I haven't seen in person for a long time are just a mouse click away on Google Voice and it's easy to have daily conversations on chat.

I'm loving the (relatively) new Gmail voice feature that lets users call anyone's phone in the US and Canada for free. It's a nice surprise to hear from my faraway friends on my cell phone (a reward for actually answering an unknown number?) and not my laptop speakers, and even better knowing that I'm not costing them a dime. Google recently announced that calls to the US and Canada would remain free through 2011; I can't think of a better gift this holiday than talking to distant friends and family for free!

One of the benefits of toting a phone that runs Google's OS is taking advantage of Google products' optimal performance on the device. Such is the case with the newly updated Gmail for Android, which comes with "a bunch of updates based on your feedback."

First, Gmail's popular and useful Priority Inbox is now included in the app. Priority Inbox view on your Android device includes all of the messages deemed important, regardless of whether or not they have been read; you can archive messages, delete, or mark them unimportant. You can also set up notifications for your Priority Inbox; configure your phone to vibrate or ring in the settings menu.

Find out what else is new after the break.

After launching Priority Inbox earlier this year, Gmail is now adding a few helpful features to keep your important messages visible. According to statistics, Priority Inbox users spend 43 percent more time reading important mail compared to unimportant, and 15 percent less time reading email compared to users who don’t use the feature.

Google already shared its top-of-the-line method for deeming an email's importance based on a user's email history and starred messages. Now, a new change tells you exactly why Google added the message to your priority inbox: hovering over the importance marker (that icon that designates messages important) displays the quick reason for the message's selection.

The engineers at Google have also made Priority Inbox much faster, responding to user complaints that it took too long to learn what is important and what is not.

If you're an avid user of Gmail like I am, there are plenty of protections against accidentally sending your boss an email. First, there is the great Undo Send feature that can delay the sending of your email for up to 30 seconds, then there's the Gmail feature that's like sobriety test for emails — Mail Goggles.

Although this neat feature is meant to prevent another, "Oh my god. Don't tell me, I drunken emailed him again!", it can actually prevent some office no-nos. For example, when it's really late at night and you're really tired, you might not realize that you're typing your boss's email address in the sender field. If you enable Mail Goggles, it'll give you some simple math problems to do to make sure you're in the right frame of mind before sending an email. The best part of it is, you can time it so that it's only active during certain times like after midnight.

Although Mail Goggles is a really useful tool, my best piece of advice to prevent this email blunder from happening is to stick to the rule of only sending emails during the day.

One of the benefits of an Android phone: seamless and easy integration with your Gmail contacts, entering your Gmail address syncs all of your contacts almost instantly.
But there is a downside: Google's method of storing every person you've ever emailed may be taking up more space than your authorized contacts.

The fact that Gmail saves anyone you've corresponded with can be helpful, especially if you haven't yet added him or her to your contacts list. However, when your Android device syncs with Gmail, these "unwanted" contacts take up room, and could result in slower device performance.

To find out how to access and edit these contacts, keep reading.

Last week, Google unveiled five new themes for Gmail, including two can't-be-simpler Basic Black and Basic White along with three additional themes that offer a little more excitement.

First up, the Android theme features a cute graphic of the green Google character, using colors and patterns that match Android's interface. Tree Tops is a nature-inspired theme featuring a fresh image of (you guessed it) trees, and finally, Marker is a fun, whimsical, and certainly not buttoned-up theme that looks a lot like it was drawn by hand and colored in with bold markers.

There are now 39 different Gmail themes, not including the option to choose your own color scheme.