Mini-productivity tip: send a Gmail without getting distracted by your inbox

15 points by uberc 13 years ago | 7 comments

Easily distracted by new email messages (or old ones that make you feel guilty for not replying) whenever you go to Gmail to send an email?

Try this: instead of going to Gmail directly and being confronted by your inbox as normal, create a web shortcut for this URL --

https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm

-- and click that instead. You'll get a clean, distraction-less Gmail compose new message screen. You can send your email and be on your way as if your inbox never existed.

scottyallen 13 years ago |

I do this too:) I've aliased this to the keyword "sendmail" in chrome by adding it as a search engine in preferences, so I can just type "sendmail" or "sendmail email@example.com" in the url bar.

However, an even higher win for me is aliasing search in the same way. I used to find that when I went into my email to look for a particular piece of info I would get so distracted by my inbox that I never ended up completing the task I was originally working on. I've aliased https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/<searcht...; to "ms <searchterm>", such that I can type "ms paypal" in my url bar and get all my recent paypal receipts without having to be tempted by my inbox first:)

My only frustration is that gmail is still so damn slow to load. I know they've spent a lot of time trying to make this fast (I spent about 2 years working on reducing latency on Google search), but they're still so far away from where they could be.

I really, really wish gmail loaded the html first, showing my inbox or search or whatever, and then loaded and attached all the javascript later. This could result in search level latencies for the initial load of data for the user to start looking at, even if it took a while longer to be fully interactive.

uberc 13 years ago | |

Very nice re: the search alias. Thanks for sharing that -- it was the next thing I was going to try to figure out. I just wish there was a way to get a Gmail search result without the sidebar with the number of unread emails in your inbox... To look or not to look... :-)

scottyallen 13 years ago | | |

I think you can turn off that that unread number somewhere in the options. It still shows up in bold if there are unread emails, but it's a partial solution at least.

hollerith 13 years ago | |

Thanks for the tip.

Here is an Emacs command that does the same thing that your Chrome keyword does:

  (defun gmail-search (string) (interactive "sQuery to submit to Gmail: ") (browse-url (concat "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/" (url-hexify-string string))))

degenerate 13 years ago | |

Inbox preview used to be a labs feature that loaded a quick HTML view of your inbox as the interface rendered. It satisfied your last wish, but sadly they removed it in the new gmail.

arikrak 13 years ago |

I used to have https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#compose bookmarked to avoid needing 2 steps to write a mail, but then Gmail came out with their new compose box. But the above lets you avoid the sidebar entirely..

tagabek 13 years ago |

Thanks! That's a really cool tip! There are so many interesting features that Gmail (and many other Google products) has to offer. My favorites are everything that goes on behind the hood.