Recently, Google unveiled (and in two cases, formally announced) new features for their online email service, Gmail.

The features include easier replying, new message notification, chatting online, forward-to-all, and a native Mobile Gmail. Several of these features are features that are “why didn’t I think of that” type features. They’re all deceptively simple, yet effective and incredibly useful additions to Gmail. Hopefully other webmail providers will follow suit.

After the jump: summaries and screenshots of the new features.

Reply on Top
In the past, when you had long conversations and needed to reply, you had to scroll endlessly until you reached the bottom and could press the reply button.

Fortunately - our days of scrolling are done thanks to “Reply on top”. Every message in a conversation now has a Reply button, with a small drop-down icon next to it allowing you to easily access other features such as “Reply to all”, Forward, Print, and others (see screenshot).

New Message Notification
I was lead to notice Reply on top because of this future. As part of Oratos Media, Huw, Jacob, Peter, and I maintain a mailing list for easy communication. Often someone sends a reply to a conversation, while someone else is just typing their own reply, invalidating it! Then we’ll have to add another reply, and clutter up the list even more.

It’s a bit frustrating sometimes, but Gmail has fixed this problem. If, while you’re viewing or typing message, someone adds a new reply, you’re notified, and you’re offered the option to update the conversation with the new message. If you’re typing a reply, you won’t lose your reply (I tried). This is a wonderfully simple yet brilliant feature that shows why Gmail stays on top in terms of features.

Forward All
Forward your entire conversation instead of just the most recent message.

Chat offline
Traditionally, chat worked simply, when people were online, you typed your message to them and they typed back - in real time. Google has thrown this to the wind with Chat offline. As they say, “if you’re chatting with a friend who goes offline, your friend will be able to see whatever you were typing the next time he or she goes online.”

This doesn’t just apply to the ‘newly offline’ though, any offline chatter, no matter how long, will receive a message a next sign-on. This can be useful if you don’t want to launch Gmail but have Gtalk open - just pop open a chat window and send your message.

Gmail for your Mobile
Gmail is now available as a native mobile application, instead of a pared-down web interface. It’s been blogged into submission so I don’t have much more to add.