Gmail: Save time with Send and Archive

I know it can save you only a few seconds, but having one button to send an email and archive it at the same time in Gmail. Well, a few seconds can pile up to lost of hours saved, right? Besides, I like to keep my inbox clean.

Pal Takacsi, Engineering Manager from Google apparently felt the same way. The annoyance of sending an email, then going back to the inbox and then archiving it got to Pal, so he whipped up a Gmail Labs experiment.

The new experimental function doesn’t do much, actually. It’s just a single purpose button called “Send and Archive”. What it does is – you guessed it – sends an email and then automatically archives the thread so you don’t have to waste time sending an email and then going to the inbox to archive the said thread.

Seriously, this feature will help those who are so obsessed with “inbox zero” achieve it. I, for one, like to keep my inbox mail counts to a single digit (yes, i can get really anal retentive about that sometimes). But one feature I’d like to see here would be an “Undo” button, so you can move a message back to the Inbox without having to go into the All Mail view.

To activate Send and Archive in Gmail, just log in to your Gmail account, and go to the Settings link on the upper right side. Then when you’re in there, just look for and click on the “Labs” tab. There you’ll be able to activate Send and Archive. You can also activate lots of other cool Gmail Labs features. If you’re too lazy to go through all those steps, you can also go to your Gmail Labs tab by clicking here.

So, if you’re really anal about that mythical inbox zero that people are hoping to achieve, then go get Send and Archive from Gmail Labs. And if it works, don’t hesitate to tell us here about it, ok?