Gmail rolls out host of new features including disappearing emails

There’s also a new snooze feature

Sometimes you need to adapt to survive. That statement is as true in the world of communication technology as it is anywhere else. Google is a company striving to be trend setters, rather than followers, so it’s no surprise to see them trying to adapt to the future once again.

As a communication service, email has taken a few bumps in the last while; see the 2016 US presidential election, the rise of instant messaging services and general security worries for more info on that.

By no means is email on its last legs (Gmail had 1.4 billion active users last month) but the reputation of the medium has taken a few shots. Google reckons they can recover from those shots and get to a place of supreme trust, with a host of improvements, including a new feature which has already proved popular on certain apps; disappearing messages.

A new version of Gmail is set to be rolled out this week and it will look a little different. There will be a slightly different design and it will also be engineered to help with productivity, with some calendar and prioritization tweaks.

Gmail Confidential Mode
The new confidential mode in Gmail

However, the most interesting new feature in the latest Gmail will be an all new confidential mode. Mission impossible style, this will cause the message to expire in a time period you choose, which can be anything between one day and five years. The message won’t self destruct, so don’t worry about explosions, however you can lock it with a passcode. This code will be sent to the user’s phone.

For extra security, the recipient will be unable to forward or print the message. Best of all, the message can be revoked at any time and it will even work with mails that are not sent to other Gmail accounts.

There will also be a few tools installed to prevent phishing scams. Google will color-code dangerous mails and will highlight particularly risky ones using a newly developed algorithm.

Snooze in Gmail
Snooze in Gmail

In what we would rank somewhere between useful and potentially super-annoying, Google will also introduce a tool called ‘nudging.’ This will push emails of importance to the top of the inbox.

This is just a taste of the features that Google will be introducing in their latest version, which by the looks of it seems to be quite the improvement.

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