Recently, several small albeit significant tweaks have been rolled out to make Gmail that much more user friendly. Here is a quick rundown on the changes that have been effected in the operational part and display, as well so as to make the service more comprehensive and compact.

• The first noticeable modification is in regards to auto save ‘contacts’ setting. A majority of users won’t mind their email service to automatically save every address that they send a message to. This can be of help in recovering forgotten mail addresses of former colleagues, friends, and professional contacts, who are extremely valuable. There are people you contacted perhaps some time ago but lost the contact. In such a scenario, auto save ‘contacts’ setting can come to your rescue. However for some users, this feature can seem like a buildup of unnecessary contacts clutter. So Gmail has rolled out a new setting that allows people to turn off this option available on the General tab.
• There are now clear precautionary signals for typos in addresses that we all might make, when addressing mail. Earlier, if you left out the dot in your “.com”, the service would tell you about an error but won’t be able to point it out. Now, it lets you know which particular address is problematic – much easier while sorting through a long mailing list.
• Gmail’s filters are useful for the purpose of automatically organizing messages. Sometimes those filters may result in sending out mails you wanted to retain in the trash. If you replied to a Trash message, the service would carry an error message that you’d be needed to click through to carry on. Now, you will still notice the error, but there won’t be a pop up and provides an easy way for moving it out out of Trash box right from there.
• You can quickly generate filters from the ‘Filter messages like this’ showing up on some mail messages. Now, after having saved your filter, the service direct you back to the message you were checking. As you also must be aware, Keyboard shortcuts are quite helpful. Try Shift+? – a one useful keyboard shortcut now automatically turned on to offer you a quick peek into all of them plus an easy link to enable from right there.
• There have been some changes to Refresh button as well. For quite some time, users have been pointing out to the inconsistency or inconvenience of having ‘Refresh’ in the menu bar as a link, next to most other buttons. Gmail has now changed it to a button so as to remove the discrepancy for it to match.

Meanwhile, Google would now use WebP (image compression format that it had recently open sourced in order to replace JPEG standard) for Gmail, Picasa and its Chrome browser.