Blogs on Gmail and Google Accounts

This blog is inspired by a question from the Gmail Help Community where the user had posted asking how to estimate the size of a Gmail Draft. Daily users of Gmail would know that Gmail doesn't display either the size of individual messages or drafts and it would be a nice thing if they did so that the users would know how close they are to the 25 MB message size limit. But until that day arrives, how should we approach handling this question? Gmail search always had  size , larger , and smaller operators and we are going to use them. We might not get the exact size, but we can get a fairly close approximate value. Let's see how! We have created a set of three drafts. Two fairly similar and one slightly smaller. The Gmail search bar is located above the messages. So, we click on the downward arrow that's to the right of the bar and focus on the few fields that are towards the bottom of the search definition screen, namely Size and Search. 

A few days ago, a peer of mine in the Gmail and Google Accounts help communities, shared with me a link to a thread where a user happened to mention seeing the Update category label in his messages even after he has deselected the categories in his default Gmail layout from the  Inbox tab under Gmail settings . The user also included screenshots which looked like the ones below: Given how most of our Gmail is set up, this appeared odd. The categories are not labels; so, how could they appear as such? Since the categories appeared as labels, it was apparent that the reason for this uncommon behavior should lie inside the Labels tab under Gmail settings . In there, scrolling down below the System labels section, under Categories, it appeared as seen below, and the highlighted section resolved the mystery. The click to show/hide in message list options, set to show, caused this unusual display of categories as labels in the user's inbox. When I cli

Labels are among the unique features of Gmail. So, while reading through the Gmail Help article on Labels,  Create labels to organize Gmail , I was a bit surprised when I realized that it does not contain instructions on how to change the color of the labels.  When a label is created in Gmail, they are assigned a default color which is somewhat dark grayish. To change the default color, head over to the left panel section of the Gmail page where the labels are listed, locate the label, and hover the mouse pointer over it.  When you do that, you will notice a 3-dot (overflow/more menu) icon appear on the right side. Click on it to see a list of label-related actions. Click on the first option that reads Label color to see a palette of preset combinations. Click on any to select and apply that combination of text and background color to that label. If you do not fancy any of the preset color combinations of the palette, or if you have exhausted them owing t