Not all Gmail Labs are created equal. Some are really useful, and some are just – well – let’s just say not so useful. But with so many Labs out there, which ones should you enable and which ones should you leave alone? We’ve got that covered, along with a short explanation as to their usefulness to your domain. Gmail is powerful, but it can be even more feature rich with these Labs turned on.

You can easily access your Gmail Labs by heading to the upper right hand corner of your inbox. There’s a drop down menu there.

Right Side Chat

It’s often more convenient to have your chat box over on the right, where there is more space for you to work off of.

Signature Tweaks

This removes the “–” line that appears before signatures which is a nice little added touch that looks quite nice.

Sender Time Zone

If you work with a lot of folks who are international, you know how difficult it is to wrap your mind around all those hours.

Video chat enhancements

Everything’s bigger and better with this one:

Pictures in chat

You can see photos of the people you’re chatting with if you use this one. That is, if they have photos uploaded of course.

Message translation

This Lab offers simple integration with Google Translate. Very helpful for dealing with language barrier issues.

Inserting Images

Instead of just attaching and image, you can insert it into an email – which can be a whole lot easier.

Green Robot!
You’ll see the green robot when someone is available in chat but is on their Android phone.

Google Voice Player in mail

Want to listen to your Google Voice messages right inside your email? This is the right Lab to be doing that.

Google Docs previews in mail

Any Google Doc link is instantly recognized resulting in a small preview window right inside of the message.

Create a Document

You can launch that great idea in the form of a Document right away with this Lab turned on.

Undo Send
This one is fantastic: you’ll get a short window after you hit send to make a quick undo and recheck your email.

Of course, we certainly encourage you to take the time to experiment with some of the other Labs that might be useful for your domain. In fact, post in the comments if you find something really useful for all those Google Apps users out there that we did not include!