Google Make Improvements In Gmail To Compose Email More Efficiently

We’re Making Several Improvements In Gmail To Help Users Compose Email More Efficiently And Confidently, Says Google

Confidence in Gmail suffered last year after a spam filter flaw sent potentially malicious emails direct to users’ inboxes. Google responded with impressive upgrades and now Gmail has taken another massive step forward. In an official blog post, Google has announced radical changes to how you will send email through Gmail, and it is going to have a dramatic effect on billions of users.  “We’re making several improvements in Gmail to help users compose email more efficiently and confidently,” explained the company, and they are centered on making the “To”, “Cc” and “Bcc” fields smarter and more secure. Let’s break them down:

Control what contact name is displayed to email recipients

A feature requested for about as long as Gmail has existed (17 years), you can now differentiate between how a contact is saved in your contacts list and how that contact will be displayed to others receiving the email.

Recipient Avatars

Everyone has sent an email to the wrong person. This is easy to do because monitoring an auto-completed email address isn’t always first and foremost when you are concentrating on what to write. Now, Gmail will display avatars for each recipient in the To, Cc and Bcc fields making errors much less likely.

Flagging external recipients

When you compose email within one company, Gmail will now flag anyone who breaks that pattern in a deep yellow color along with a warning banner.

Duplicate recipient detection

Gmail’s send fields now have the smarts to stop you adding someone twice. When you begin typing an address into the To, Cc or Bcc fields, anyone already added will now be greyed out. This also applies to drag and drop with duplicate entries automatically removed.

Email and formatting validation

Google states that “Gmail now validates that email addresses are typed in the correct email format (e.g. username@domain.com), and will prevent any strings from becoming recipient chips if they are not formatted correctly”. This is brilliant and will stop emails sending with incomplete addresses and cutting down on bounce back messages.

Availability And Limitations

As smart and welcome as these changes are (combined they are set to have a massive impact on compose email), there are limitations you need to know about.  The biggest is that these changes are only initially rolling out to Google Workspace and G Suite Basic and Business customers for now. That in itself is a huge market with Google confirming last year that Workspace had over 2.6 billion monthly active users in 2020, but there is no timeline yet for regular Gmail accounts to benefit from these changes.  The good news is Google has a history of bringing key Workspace/G Suite upgrades to regular Gmail users (most recently, tighter integration of Gmail with Google Meet) but it can take time. That said, these are the kind of smart, intuitive upgrades Gmail needs to retain its market dominance and all Gmail users should be excited about them.

This news was originally published at Forbes