Recently, search giant Google Inc. has added some new features to its Web mail service Gmail.

The intuitive, efficient, and useful beta version of Gmail was available for general public from February 7, 2007. Gmail is getting more and more popularity day by day and till date it has millions of users. This feature will make you to walk through the additional features that are adde In this feature I am going to present additional features added by Google to Gmail.

Group chat is a small but interesting feature for Gmail users that allows you to chat with more than one friend at the same time. This can be achieved by following these simple steps:

•    Start a chat with a single person in your Contacts list.

•    Once you've started the chat, click Options at the bottom left of your chat window and select Group Chat.

•    In the labeled “Add a person to this chat”; enter the name of the contacts you want to add to your group chat.

The group chat will continue until all participants have left.

Free IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) feature will automatically and instantly synchronize your inbox with your phone or your desktop and you can make changes from anywhere to your inbox. IMAP creates a constant connection between mail clients (desktop and/or mobile) and Gmail. The feature also allows users to download messages from Gmail's servers onto their computer so that they can access their mail with a programme like Microsoft Outlook Express or Apple Mail.

Increased attachment limit is another distinctive amendment is that Gmail has fixed attachment limit to 20 megabytes (MB). But, when you add an attachment, the size of a file may increase because transport encodings are automatically added and it means that in some cases, attachments that are 17 to 20MB in size may push the total message size to above 20MB. Attachment is actually a computer file which is sent along with an e-mail message which can be sent in either in unencoded form, or encoded form.

A message notification provides you a better and smarterway to access your mails as this feature notify you on your phone, when you got a new message in your inbox. More so, if someone sends a reply while you're in the middle of reading a conversation or replying to it, you'll get a notification that a new message has arrived. You can easily update your Gamil by clicking “update conversation" option in your mailbox.

Get mail from other accounts allows you to retrieve your mails either new and old from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail and you can create customized 'From:' address, which allows you to send messages from Gmail. One thing that should be taken into consideration is that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled.

New Gadgets surfing features provides you an option to integrate Google Gadgets in Gmail's left-hand navigation bar. For the initial phase, the company has provided two sample Gadgets Google Docs and Calendar. The Gadgets can be easily enabled through the Gmail Labs tab in the Settings menu. Google has also added a Gmail Labs option to `Add any gadget by URL,' which allows you to add any Gadget using iGoogle.

An emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form. Examples of well known emoticons are the smiley faces. Emoticons have been available on Google Chat for quite some time, but recently they made their appearance on Gmail. Besides the common gestures like smiling or winking, the new emoticons have been added to help users get their points across better.

At crux, we can say that the above additional features will make Gmail more efficient and usable for users.

Satinder Kaur/ITVoir Network