New in Gmail: Smart Labels and Click to Call

Like every month, March hasn’t been any different for the Gmail team. They are keeping busy as usual and have already announced two new Gmail enhancements in the recent past.

The two new Gmail features – Smart Labels and Click to Call, are pretty good in my opinion and can come in handy in certain situations. Let us see what they are all about.

Smart Labels

I cannot possibly imagine Gmail without its ever powerful labels. I’ve lost the count of the number of labels I’ve created over the past few years of my love affair with Gmail. They were what made me switch to Gmail at the first place.

But they aren’t automatic; you have to create them along with the appropriate filters manually. This is what the Smart Labels feature wants to change.

Well, not a big change yet but it has started on the right note. This new feature will automatically create the following 3 labels.

1. Bulk – Any email that’s sent out to a huge number of people at once, like promotions and newsletters, end up automatically in this label.

2. Forums – As the name indicates, messages from forums and mailing lists end up here.

3. Notifications – Specific notifications sent to you, like account receipts, land up in this label.

Smart Labels is currently a part of Gmail Labs and you can enable it from there. The good thing about this feature is that it also integrates well with your existing filters and labels. You can easily edit and change the smart filters that make up this label.

Click to Call

If you are in the US, you probably use the call phone feature in Gmail almost every day. You’d be happy to know that now there’s more for you in the form of this new enhancement called Click to Call.

As you see in the above screenshots, this new feature now turns any phone number that’s there in an email into a link. When clicked, the link immediately opens a Gmail call phone dialpad making the calling process quicker and easier. Cool, isn’t it?

Hope the above features make you more productive with Gmail.