Hivelogic - Labs Love At Last

Labs Love At Last

Thursday, 4 December 2008 • Short URL • 19 comments

In early November 2008, I wrote about the lack of Google Labs in many people’s Google Apps (GApps) accounts. The Google Labs feature allows users to enable new features and fixes, including great improvements to IMAP functionality, like better folder (aka label) management, auto-expunge control, and more. Labs has been available almost across the board for Gmail users for some time. And while many GApps users were able to enable Labs for their accounts without issue, the large majority were still waiting for the functionality to appear.

Google knew about the problem, and indicated it would take 2 to 3 weeks to work in a fix, explaining that “the whole code which is responsible for enabling Labs needs to be re-written so it can be integrated into the current backend code
structure.”

Although it took a bit longer than expected, I’m happy to report that throughout this week (today, for me), Labs has started to appear for GApps users across the board.

How to Enable Labs in Google Apps

If you’re the GApps administrator, you need to enable a two features for your account:

Go to https://www.google.com/a/your_domain.com (just replace your_domain.com with your Google Apps-hosted domain name)
Click the Domain Settings tab
Under the New Services and Features section, check both the Automatically add new Google service and Turn on new features checkboxes
Click the Save Changes button

I’m not sure how long it will take for Labs to appear, but assuming that Google has fixed their issues, and according to the New Services and Features document, it should take 24 hours or less.

If you’ve already enabled these settings and you’ve been waiting for Labs to appear, there’s a good chance it’s already there. Go to the next step, below.

Checking for Labs in Your GApps or Gmail Account

In Gmail, and for each GApps account, you’ll know if Labs is enabled if you see a Labs link under the Settings section. You may also see a little beaker adjacent to the Settings link at the top (which is just a shortcut to the Labs tab under the Settings section).

Tweaking IMAP

Although there are many cool features available in Google Labs, the killer feature for those of us who use IMAP with GApps or Gmail is the Advanced IMAP Controls feature. The Advanced IMAP Controls feature lets you choose which labels show up in IMAP, turn off message auto-expunging, and control if and how messages are trashed when they’re deleted from IMAP. As I’d detailed in my previous article (and this sentiment was echoed in the comments section), having the ability to control which IMAP folders (called labels in Gmail/GApps) appear in your mail application is a great boon for those of us with thousands of archived emails living in Gmail’s ominous All Mail folder.

To enabled the Advanced IMAP Controls feature, just click the Enable radio button and click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the list of Labs features.

Now, and hiding All Mail, Starred, or any other folder is just a checkbox away. Click the Labels tab under the Settings section, and you’ll see a clean list of your current Labels. You can use the Show in IMAP checkboxes on the right to disable any of the Labels you’d like to hide from your mail client. Although your GMail interface won’t be affected by this change, your mail client (e.g. Mail.app or Entourage) will now only display the folders you want.

As evidenced by the comments in my last article on this subject, many people like the All Mail folder, and find their email using search. I prefer to sort the messages I save into Folders in my mail application (I use Mail.app on Mac OS X). I can still use search to find email messages, or I can browse using my own organizational structure. And with Advanced IMAP Controls enabled, when I delete an email, I can control what actually happens to it.

Of course there are many more cool Labs features worth checking out … all finally available to those of us using Google Apps.

Will these features change how you’re using GApps/Gmail? Are you using it as a solution for yourself or your company? What other Labs features would you say are also killer features?

Filed in Development, Software.

Dhiraj Gupta

04 December 2008 at 11:00 am

Hey thanks Dan!

Both those settings were on for me, I guess it must be either the default, or I must’ve turned it on earlier.

But in any case, the labs icon shows in the google mail top bar for my mailbox and I can add all the labs features. Neat! :)

Aaron

04 December 2008 at 11:28 am

Finally! I switched my email hosting to Google a few months back and I love it…now if we could only get themes.

Allan Libunao

04 December 2008 at 12:02 pm

Whoa! I didn’t realize I had a ‘labs’ tab under my gapps/gmail settings!

Thanks for posting this, I love having access to the canned responses feature for my domain emails.

:-)

Pablo 'Silvasonic' Silva

04 December 2008 at 12:33 pm

Same thing here - http://mail.silvasonic.com (the LABS link just popped up on the nav bar this afternoon).

Collin Allen

04 December 2008 at 8:04 pm

This is excellent! I just hid a bunch of folders, and my IMAP access is so clean now! Thanks for letting everyone know this feature was added, and how to go about using it.

pwb

04 December 2008 at 8:35 pm

Wow, how can you use Gmail without “Search: All Mail”? That’s the single best feature of Gmail!

James Duncan Davidson

04 December 2008 at 9:50 pm

Yep. Labs is there for me as well. I thought it wasn’t at first, but then I quit Mailplane and logged back and and—voila!—there it was in all of its glory. Hurray.

Mo

05 December 2008 at 6:03 am

For me, the IMAP Label customisation is killer. I’ve had Labs available on my own GApps domain for a while, but it hadn’t appeared on my company’s, which was unfortunate.

The thing about All Mail is… if you have a lot of messages (i.e., tens, or even hundreds of thousands, like I do), it’ll cripple most IMAP clients.

I used to work around it by setting an “IMAP Folder Prefix”, but that was pretty ugly (though it did work—my mail clients would never see the [Google Mail] folder); the IMAP controls in Labs are a much *much* cleaner alternative.

victor

05 December 2008 at 6:13 am

Did it take so long for you? Just 2 days after reading your previous post on the subject, I had it enabled. Guess they must have done it in batches.

David Collantes

05 December 2008 at 7:53 am

Had had Google Labs on my Google for Domains account since day one, and I got it over a year ago. It surprises me so many people did not have it.

Michael

05 December 2008 at 8:08 am

I unselected the All Mail Show in IMAP radio button and found that every folder but my Inbox and Apple Mail To Do (Sent Mail, Trash, Junk/Spam, etc) disappeared from both Apple’s Mail application and my iPhone.

Surely this isn’t the behaviour that is desired?

Incidentally I have read (and re-read) the 5 Thirty One article about configuring Google Apps Mail with iPhone and Apple Mail, but I still seem to have an unseemly amount of msimatched/named folders, etc. Are there any other resources that Apple users can recommend?

Kevin Rodgers

05 December 2008 at 8:38 am

@Mo I’m using the IMAP Folder Prefix workaround and am curious what you mean that it was pretty ugly. I actually prefer it to seeing the [Google Mail] folder in OS X Mail.

A picture of my setup can be seen here: http://flickr.com/photos/kevrodg/3060437406/

I still don’t know what I’m missing by using this setup. If someone can clue me in about why I would need to use the Advanced IMAP feature, I would appreciate it.

Kevin Rodgers

05 December 2008 at 8:39 am

*http://flickr.com/photos/kevrodg/3057950390/

Bramus!

05 December 2008 at 9:03 am

At last indeed! Finally we can add our calendar into the Gmail interface.

Thanks for keeping us up to date Dan.

Bram.

Michael

05 December 2008 at 9:04 am

And still, some 30 minutes after rechecking the display All Mail radio button, my iPhone is still only showing Inbox and Apple Mail To Do, and I can’t see any evidence in Apple Mail on my MBP of the folders that disappeared (even after instructing it to Synchonize the account).

Any ideas? I was finding the Google / Apple interface less than ideal, but until I can get it back to that state my email experience is going to be a whole lot worse.

05 December 2008 at 3:01 pm

To Mo:
I don’t have _tens_ or _hundreds_ of thousands of emails in my INBOX on my IMAP server, but I do have almost 17000 at the moment, and alpine handles it well. http://www.washington.edu/alpine/