Gadgetory

Hey, this is Natt with The Verge, and I am here with the new Gmail, which just got its biggest redesign in years. It's now supposed to be better at managing tasks and security, which is great news for the 1.4 billion people who use Gmail every day. So the biggest change here, you'll notice, is on the right side with different icons for calendar, keep, and task. Task is sort of the newest thing that you'll see in Gmail. You can add different tasks by just typing it in or you can drag an email that you want to add, for example this one, and you can click this to get contacts of what you're looking at and also edit it so that you can add a date and integrate that with your calendar as well. In addition to these three apps, you can also click the plus button for the G Suite Marketplace, which has a bunch of different apps that you can add to your taskbar. So at first glance, the new Gmail is super cool and has a lot of white space, but it also does look super busy. For example, you can't actually change the width of the sidebar on the right, and also, all your attachments on default view now appear in line, which is not my favorite thing because now it takes up a lot more space, fewer emails are visible at first glance. The point of all this, however, is that attachments are kinda there so you don't have to click the email to get to the attachment. Now, if you don't like all your attachments showing in file, you can always just go to display density and click comfortable or compact to get the paperclip back so that none of your files are showing at first glance. There are also other useful shortcuts. For example, you can just hover the email and you'll get a shortcut to either archive, delete, mark as read or unread, and the new button that says snooze. Now, this was previously available with Inbox by Google, but now you can click snooze and pick a later time. It gives you some suggestions, or you can click your own date and time or, my favorite, someday. So these are all the new productivity tools, but the next most important thing with the new Gmail is security. You might have remembered last year where a bunch of Google users were hit with the Google Doc phishing attack. Now with the new Gmail, Google is going to be better highlighting these suspicious emails with a big red box that is a lot harder to overlook. There's also going to be a new confidential mode, which builds on features you might already be used to from apps like Snapchat and Instagram. For example, messages can now have an expiration date which self-destructs after a certain amount of time or you can revoke read privileges, which basically means you can unsend an email. You can also require two-factor authentication on individual emails so that before the recipient even opens it, they have to verify themselves. Now obviously that doesn't count for screenshotting emails, so it's not a foolproof method, but it is something. For business account, Google will also block forwarding, downloading, printing emails to prevent sensitive materials from getting out. So by now you're probably wondering, when am I gonna get this new Gmail? Google isn't rolling this out by default at first, so to get it, you have to go to your settings cog, click it, and see if you have the new Gmail option. If it's enabled for you, it will be there, if it's not, just hang tight. They're still rolling it out globally, but it's going to take some time, so just be patient. And if you have a G Suite account, so that's if you use Gmail at work or at school, you wanna contact the system administrator to make sure that they enable it so that you can turn it on from your settings cog. If you don't have the new Gmail yet, don't feel super left out. Some of the new features, like confidential mode, aren't even available yet, and it's gonna be a while until Google rolls this out. In early May, however, Google I/O will be taking place, so we can probably expect some more themes around increased security, getting things done more quickly, and a whole lot of new features to come with Android P. Thanks for watching. Let us know in the comments if you have the new Gmail yet and what you think of it. I'd love to hear more. And for more coverage on Gmail and all the other fun stuff, visit us at theverge.com or youtube.com/theverge.