Auto-complete is a convenient and
time-saving email feature, but click too carelessly and auto-complete can be a quick route to email embarrassment. Who among us has not accidentally sent an email to
the wrong recipient, at least once? GMail Labs to the rescue!
Gmail has just turned out a handy little experimental feature — “Got the Wrong Bob?” — that may save you a few career-crippling incidents, or at the very least some cringes and apologies.
Useful? Maybe not every day, but just imagine that one slip of the
mouse when you accidentally include your old college pal Bob Smith in
the list of email recipients for the draft annual report, instead of
emailing it to the Vice President, Bob Jones:
If you’re emailing more than two people at once, Gmail will check
if you meant to include Bob Smith rather than Bob Jones based on the
groups of people you email most often.
If you want to test “Got the wrong Bob?” out, try faking a mistake like this:
- Think of three people you often email together.
- Compose a message to two of them.
- Start typing the third member of the group (for help you can use
one of the people we suggest in “Don’t forget Bob”), but then
auto-complete on the wrong name.
GMail Labs has also changed the rather boringly named “Suggest a Recipient” feature to “Don’t Forget Bob”
since the two features are clearly complementary.
The “Don’t Forget
Bob” feature gets Gmail to suggest names from your contacts you might
want to include when you email to a group of people. For example, if
you usually email your project updates to all of your Board members and
you forget to include the VP this week, you’ll get a nudge to check if
the omission was intended.
To enable “Don’t Forget Bob,” “Got the Wrong Bob?” or any other of
the surprisingly useful experimental features in Gmail Labs, just login
to your Gmail account and click the Labs tab under Settings. You can
try out a Labs feature simply by clicking the Enable radio button —
then, if it’s not for you, disable it again just as easily.
Got an email horror story to get off your chest, where "Got the Wrong Bob?" could have saved your bacon?
Are there other GMail Labs features that you find especially helpful?