Gmail Introduces Outlook Style Mail Preview Pane

Anyone who has ever used Outlook knows about the mail preview pane that enables one to quickly check the contents of an email in a separate vertical or horizontal pane. Many web based services, like Yahoo Mail, borrowed this feature and looks like Gmail is the latest in that league.

Gmail has introduced Preview Pane as part of its Labs, and you can enable it to get the functionality in your inbox. Not that Gmail didn’t have this before but it was only limited to Gmail on a tablet device, like the iPad.

Once you enable preview pane in Gmail Labs, you’ll see a small toggle button on the top right of your message list. You can use this to switch between the normal list view, and the new preview view.

Here’s what the preview pane looks like. It is similar to what it looks like on Gmail’s tablet version, or the preview panes in other email clients.

The preview pane can be horizontally aligned to your message list, or placed vertically below your message list. I have found that preferences of people for a horizontal or vertical preview pane vary a lot. Whatever your preference for the position of the preview pane might be, you can set it from the dropdown arrow in that toggle button on the top right.

Finally, you can also adjust the timing of the message being marked read after it is previewed, in the Settings. The default is a 3-second delay.

So, although the feature isn’t innovative and existed in other email clients, I don’t think the customization options that Gmail has introduced, like the ability to adjust marked-as-read-timing, exist elsewhere too.