Google to launch a new Gmail design

Earlier this week, Google revealed that it’s planning to launch a new design for Gmail on the web in the coming weeks. Tom Warren the senior editor for The Verge has been leaking news about the new Gmail design all week. Google is redesigning the Gmail interface, introducing smart replies to the web version of Gmail, and a new confidential mood.

The new design will contain a new sidebar where you can either use Google Calendar, keep-note-taking app, or tasks side-by-side with your email messages. The new sidebar will be so useful to use other Google apps and to sync your tasks and schedule between Gmail, and Google Calendar.

With the new design you can choose from three layouts, according to Tom Warren, there will be a default view that highlights attachment like documents, a comfortable view that doesn’t highlight attachment, and a compact view where you can see a big amount of emails on a single page. The compact view is the closest to the existing one, for people who don’t like to change they can use the compact view.

Google is also introducing smart replies to the web version of Gmail, the same feature was introduced to Gmail mobile app back in May 2017 where the app will give you suggestion to quickly reply to emails. A snooze feature will be in the new version of Gmail as well, it will let you snooze emails or remove them temporarily from your inbox in order to avoid emails that you don’t have time for, and you can get them back when you need them. Both smart replies and snooze features are part of Google’s Inbox app that was introduced back in 2014, and now they are making their way to the web version.

On another piece of news, Tom Warren leaked a new feature that Google is working on which is the “Confidential mood”, which will let users control what the recipients are allowed to do with their emails, for example, they can stop them from forwarding the email, copying, or downloading. Gmail users will also require a password to open emails, the password will be generated via SMS, or even set an expiration date on sent emails. This new feature will be so useful for business who wants more control on how emails are used by recipients, but one thing that worth noticing here is that that can’t stop users from taking screenshots of the emails.

For now, that’s all we know about Google’s new update for Gmail, Google confirmed that the new update is coming in the next few weeks for The Verge. And we have to mention here the Google I/O developer conference is next month on May 8th, so it’s possible that the new update will be revealed during the conference.

Funny thing about Google’s I/O conference is that Google released the date and location of the event as a puzzle, a really hard series of riddles that are similar to the escape room riddles in real life but Google’s riddles were scattered on Google Street View. the puzzle was eventually solved by tech geeks and the conference would take place on May 8th-10th in Mountain View, California. Keep an eye on Samma3a where we will try to cover Google I/O 2018.

Here’s last year’s Google I/O conference highlights video: