Gmail introduces Multiple Inboxes, may surpass Hotmail by year-end

09 February 2009

Innovation continues unabted at Google. Since the beginning of January users have been given additional Gmail capabilities that go beyond simple email, such as offline access, easier labelling techniques and video via Gmail chat to name just a few.

Now Google has announced perhaps the most exciting one: Multiple Inboxes.

Since it was launched, Gmail users looking to view search results or a subset of their labeled messages saw their results take up their entire browser window. Now, they will be able to do multiple things at once.

In a post on the official Google Blog, software engineer Octavian "Vivi" Costache says, he developed the feature in his ''20 per cent time'', to enable users to ''spend less time monitoring important messages that may end up getting filtered away''. ''20 per cent time'' refers to the time engineers at Google are expected to devote to any personal projects of their liking.

To enable the feature, first activate Gmail Labs for your account, and then enable "Multiple Inboxes" from the list of Labs options (you'll have to scroll down a bit to find it). The term Multiple Inboxes is a bit of a misnomer - you can't actually show messages from other accounts, but that could still come in a future Labs release.

To set up your panes, go to the Gmail Settings menu and select "Multiple Inboxes" (once you've enabled them). From there, you can create up to five different panes. Creating a pane seems to be a little counter-intuitive - you'll need to manually enter the Gmail 'code' of your label (for example, "label:friends" would display a list of messages tagged with the friends label). But the system is also flexible, as it allows you to combine multiple attributes into a single pane (for example, "is:drafts" OR "is:starred" would show messages that are either drafts or starred).