Filed under: Business, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware, How-Tos
URL Trick in Gmail
by Jason Clarke Mar 6th 2008
While we may have touched on it when we covered the release of the "new" version of Gmail, we thought you (like us) might have forgotten about this great little trick. Gmail now treats every page like a web page. Okay, that might sound a bit too obvious, so we'll explain. When you open a message, label, or do a search, each of the resulting pages you see will have a dedicated URL. This means that if you bookmark or copy and paste the URL, you can later return to exactly the same view.
Even more useful is the fact that the URL for a search works across different Gmail accounts. So if you have a friend or co-worker that you know has certain information in their email, but can't seem to find it, you can do a search in your own Gmail account, then send your friend the URL for that search and they will have the exact same search criteria applied against their own account.
For example, if you want to search your Gmail account for "Download Squad", try using the following URL:
https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/%22download+squad%22
Slick!
By the way, if you're having trouble making this work, try accessing your account using the secure method. To do this, just ensure your Gmail URL begins with "https". For some reason we can't seem to make this trick work unless we're using this method.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
verycheeky said 9:55AM on 3-06-2008
No way am i going to put my data online! nice try. no wonder the stock is dropping.
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kingkool68 said 10:26AM on 3-06-2008
@verycheeky Your information is already online. To clarify this doesn't let people you send the URL to see your e-mail it just makes it easy to send them the same view with their own e-mail.
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Bryce Fischer said 10:50AM on 3-06-2008
Verycheeky... Nice try.. but as he said, its only a link to a search string. It doesn't put your data online. It just links a search string.
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invadesoda said 11:07AM on 3-06-2008
Bryce seems to be right. It is not working for me. I think my email at home has a link to the old version of Gmail, but this one doesn't, but it also doesn't have a link to the new version. I am on IE6 at the moment.
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invadesoda said 1:04PM on 3-06-2008
It looks like a good tip though, I will have uses for it at home
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Bryce Fischer said 1:13PM on 3-06-2008
on a side note, I take it this is only good with the latest version of gmail? I use the google apps for my domain, and they haven't rolled out the changes to us yet... Wonder if that's ever going to happen.
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Jason Clarke said 1:36PM on 3-06-2008
Bryce, I've got a post queued up that will explain a trick you might be able to use to get the new Gmail on your Google Apps account. There's a setting in the control panel that lets you choose if you want to enable new features as they become available.
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mister_s said 5:48AM on 3-07-2008
so now u can copy paste and email\im a link instead of telling them the key words!!WOW!!
must the feature of the year.
scoff.
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wordpartnersink said 1:58AM on 3-12-2008
I'm so glad someone has finally gotten email right--Google rocks...especially with the new Yahoo update. Good luck sending emails with their "new" pages. Mine crash more often than not.
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