On the ocasion of the fifth birthday of online e-mail service, Google announced it is going global with its Gmail Labs box of quirky functions it launched last year in English. On 1 April 2004 gmailGoogle originally announced the service , 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.
Total in 49 languages Gmail Labs will now be available internationally . 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.
Anuj Sharma is a Software Engineer at Google said that, ” 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”.
This feature is enabled by default, if you are in India. If not, you will 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.