Don’t know whether you use Google Mail or not, but there’s a few interesting things been going on with it.

First of all was the new interface, which didn’t seem much different to the old as far as I could tell, but was likely a rewrite to make the code more modular.  And now, lo and behold, GMail (I hate the term GoogleMail, but for legal reasons Google have to use it in the UK, due to a trademark dispute) has launched GoogleMail Labs.

There are several experimental modules you can plug in:

• Custom date formats – incredibly useful for those of use who are accustomed to putting the day first, then the month, and get confused by dates like 6/9/8 being the 9th of June, rather than the 6th of September (what – someone sent me email back in time?  Freaky!)
• Superstars - using star icons to “rank my friends” doesn’t appeal to me.  The ability to use an icon to distinguish between home and work email addresses, however, is indispensable.
• Fixed width font – ever tried to read a table that looks fine in a fixed width font in Times New Roman?  If you haven’t, lucky you.  If you have – this feature, like all the rest, can be found on the “Labs” tab in “Settings”.

Oh, and it turns out that new interface had a whole ream of new features too:

• You can now have a custom “from:” address.  Not just great news for spammers and other scam artists (I jest…), but useful for ordinary people too – especially as you can now retrieve email from other accounts and answer it inside Google Mail, essentially turning Google Mail into a portal to your corporate email while you’re on the road.  Or your ordinary ISP account while you’re sunning yourself abroad.
• Google Documents increases its usefulness too, adding a “view as slideshow” module to allow you to look at those pesky PowerPoint presentation attachments without client side software.  Classy.
• Auto-save.  Personally I thought it was there already – but then Firefox doesn’t tend to crash on me that often, even if I am using beta 3 release candidate 2.
• Virus scanning.  Yes, Google now thoughtfully virus-scan your incoming email for you.

There’s heaps more, and I’ve probably missed the plugin or new feature you’ll find most useful – feel free to praise it to the skies in a comment.

But before I go…  my favourite of all has to be the old school snakes game!!!  Reminds me of the Sharp MZ-700 and Snake & Snake.  Ah, such memories…