Marking
the online e-mail service’s fifth birthday, Google announced it is going global
with its Gmail Labs box of quirky functions it launched last year in English.
Google originally announced the service on 1 April 2004, and some in the
industry thought that the whole thing was an April Fool’s Day hoax. Since then
it has grown to become one of the most popular webmail services around.
Gmail
Labs will now be available internationally in 49 languages. Currently
Google is supporting five Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and
Malayalam, and businesses and schools using Google Apps should see this in the
coming weeks.
“Until
now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi,
my native language and their language of choice,” writes Anuj Sharma,
Software Engineer at Google.
If you’re
in India, this feature is enabled by default. If not, you’ll need to turn it on
in the “Language” section under Settings. Once enabled, just click the Indian
languages icon and type words in the way they sound in English — Gmail will
automatically convert them to their Indian language equivalent.
New
features include undo send, a way of retracting an e-mail up to five seconds
after you hit the send button; mail goggles, which makes you solve some math
questions before sending a message, to make it harder to send messages while
inebriated; and a forgotten attachment reminder, which reminds you to attach a
file if you mention one in your message.
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