By Mark O’Neill

Last night, my Gmail window suddenly logged off. Thinking it was just another Gmail beta snafu, I sighed and tried to log back in. When I finally got in, I realised I had the new Gmail 2.0 - new, improved - and a hell of a lot faster than its predecessor.

But before you go rushing to your Gmail in breathless anticipation, I have to warn you that unless you are a long-time Gmail user, you are unlikely to have the newer shinier version. I got my account back in 2004 and I have the new version. But someone I know who got their account in 2005 doesn’t have it. It looks as if Gmail is slowly rolling this out to users a few at a time.

To find out if you have it, just look in the top right-hand corner of the screen, next to “settings”. Does it say “new version”? If so, you’re one of the lucky ones - click on that link and have fun. No link? Then you’ll have to be patient and just read about it for the moment! However, some users and websites are reporting that despite not having the new version readily available, they can still access it at https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2 . So why not give that link a go and see if you’re lucky?

My initial impressions of Gmail 2.0 are extremely favourable. Its biggest asset is speed. This is Gmail on steroids. If you click on labels or links to folders, they open immediately. They open in less than a second. In fact, the new Gmail is so fast that your head will start spinning. With the previous version, clicking on label links or folder links meant a wait of around 5 seconds (an eternity in Email World). Now you can open 5 links in that time. It’s hard to appreciate this dramatic improvement unless you are a long-time Gmail user. According to Google, the speed improvement is due to the fact that messages are pre-fetched. All I can say is “woo-hoo!” (in my best Homer Simpson voice)

The actual interface has not changed in its design. However, saying that the fonts have been made smaller and everything has been made more compact. It’s as if someone has taken a wet cloth and cleaned the interface. It just feels cleaner and smoother. It’s hard to explain really. The shrinking of the fonts are a little disconcerting and will take some time to get used to.

Apart from speed, what are some of the other improvements and tweaks? Well, they are mostly concentrated around the new and improved contacts area. In the old Gmail, the contacts window was just a hodge-podge of contacts thrown together. The new Gmail contacts has a radically improved design - although some frequently requested features are still missing.

But one warning which I only found out about today - if you have the Better Gmail extension from Lifehacker, deactivate it. Keeping it running on the new Gmail will disable your contacts manager. But I was told by Lifehacker this morning that they are aware that the extension no longer works and they are busy working on an upgrade.

The new Gmail contacts window runs on AJAX and now has three viewing panes (compared to the one pane in the old Gmail).

Basically how it works is this - in the far left pane, you choose the category that your contact is in. The two default categories are “All Contacts” and “Most Contacted”. But it will also show any email groups that you have created. So click on the category that you need and now look to the middle pane.

The middle pane will give you a list of all the contacts within that category. Click on the contact you want and now look to the far right pane.

The far right pane then shows the details for that contact - name, address, phone numbers, photo….all the usual Gmail fare - except for one new feature. You can now add clickable links to the contact’s instant messaging ID’s - the ones supported are Jabber / Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger (the only one missing that I would like to see would be a Skype link).

It’s much easier to import and export, easier to delete contacts, and easier to add contacts to an email group. You can even now export your contacts as “V cards” to insert them into Outlook or Thunderbird.

So what’s missing? My biggest wish for contacts is to have what most other email clients have - the ability to tick a box next to each contact and then for those email addresses to be pre-populated into a new email window. Email address auto-complete is all well and good but sometimes I don’t remember to include some people in an email and so being able to go down a list of contacts and tick the ones I want to email is much better.

One other feature of the new Gmail - each page of Gmail has its own unique URL so the inbox is https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox for example. The contacts is https://mail.google.com/mail/#contacts and so on. So you could in theory bookmark each page in your browser favourites. Since Firefox also has a session saver feature, you could shut down Firefox while you’re in the Gmail contacts book, restart Firefox and automatically be taken back to the contacts right away. You can also use the back button and forward button in your browser to jump from page to page in Gmail.

Each email message now has a built-in filter manager. This is extremely useful as sometimes it is too much hassle to access the filter set-up the usual way. Using the new “Filter messages like this” feature, you can now set up a filter based on each email you receive on an email-by-email basis.

Also, I have just noticed the “Add…….to contacts list” in that menu. Does this mean that Gmail will now stop the irritating practice of automatically adding ALL contacts to the contacts book? I hope so.

One other feature of the new Gmail which I have been reading about is the ability to resize the Google Talk chat box which is built into Gmail. I stopped using the integrated chat box and started using the stand-alone Google Talk application some time ago precisely because I didn’t like how tiny the Gmail chat box was. So I am personally pleased that Google changed that.

So to sum up, Google has done an outstanding job at improving Gmail but there are still some features that should be implemented before it REALLY becomes the best email service out there. Pre-populated email windows is one as I have mentioned but also the ability to delete attachments but keep the email is also a must-have. But considering that we haven’t seen any major improvements to Gmail for ages, this is a huge leap in the right direction.

Want more on the new Gmail?

Try - Mashable, GoogleSystem, Googlified, or InsideGoogle’s coverage for more.