Google has released two cool features in Gmail through the Labs settings. They are Nested Labels and Message Sneak Peek.

Nested Labels

When Google first announced their email solution, there were two strong differentiations they made. The first was that by allowing such generous storage space, a user would never have to delete another message again. The second was to do away with folders. Those of us that have processed a few thousand emails through the evil beast, Outlook, considered this as crazy talk. How are you going to manage all those emails your saving without hundreds of folders? Google was hoping people would leverage their awesome searching capabilities, but did provide labels. Labels are analogous to tags in that a message can have multiple labels, whereas with the folder metaphor, a message can only exist in one folder unless it is copied. This actually is extremely frustrating for me. I use Apple’s Mail.app at work. I love the Spotlight/Address Book integration and in general, the whole Apple approach to email. But Apple still uses the folder metaphor. And to complicate that even further, Apple also has Smart Folders which are basically saved searches contained within an imaginary folder. There is no tagging or user-friendly labeling capability however, which makes the use of smart folders sort of clunky. In other iApps, such as iPhoto and Aperture which do use tagging and other metadata manipulation, the integration with smart folders is amazing. What does this have to do with Gmail? I use the Google Apps version of Gmail for all of my email and even though there is IMAP support, I have lots of issues with Gmail’s labels/filters and Mail’s folders/smart folders. By allowing labels within labels, I think I’ll be better off in the long run, but only if I rely on the web interface.

From Google’s Official Blog Post:

Labels are more flexible than folders because a given email can have several labels but can’t be in several folders at the same time. A highly requested feature for labels, though, comes from the world of folders: the ability to organize labels hierarchically.

If you think this might be useful to you, go to the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, look for “Nested Labels,” enable it and click “Save.” You’ll then need to name your label with slashes (/) to make it the child of another. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a simple hierarchy with a “Home” label, and inside it a “Family” and a “Vacation” label. Just create three labels with the following names:

Home
Home/Family
Home/Vacation

You can then create “Home/Family/Kids,” “Home/Pets,” etc., to get something like the screenshot on the left. If you had the parent label “Home” before you don’t have to create it from scratch.

You can create complex hierarchies of labels if that’s the way you like to organize your mail, and you can expand/collapse labels to save space. You’ll always be able to tell whether a given label contains unread messages in its collapsed child labels by looking at whether it’s bold or not.

Message Sneak Peek

This is also a cool feature. Once enabled, the user can right-click (or control-click if you’re using a 1-button mouse on a Mac) on a message to see a quick preview of the message content. I almost wish that Google would take some of the user interface methods from Reader, Google’s own RSS feed reading tool. In Reader, the user can view feeds in two ways: a river of news (expanded view), or as a list of items virtually identical to Gmail’s standard mailbox view. The difference is that in Reader, clicking an item in the list quickly expands the item to show the detail/content in line rather than changing to a separate page as in Gmail. So you click on an item in the list, a preview of the article/item is revealed and then you can open the item in a separate window/tab or collapse the item and move on. That enables me to scan hundreds of news items in less than 30 minutes. Seems like a natural fit for Gmail, but I guess Sneak Peek isn’t bad either.

Via: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-in-labs-nested-labels-and-message.html (from: Techcrunch)