The folks at Gmail Labs are busy bees all right. Rarely does a week pass before some little tweak is added to what is increasingly becoming one of the most popular mail services in the world. The latest is one that lots of Gmail users are going to love – it is the option to let you read a message without opening it.
Sounds ridiculous and just a tad illogical, right? Well, actually that is what happens. You just need to activate an option in Labs called “Message Sneak Peek.” Once you have done so, you just need to right click on a conversation or message (or hit H after selecting it) to see the text of most of the latest message pop up in a box – a preview of sorts.
There are also handy arrows to let you go back and forth to other messages in the conversation though you cannot view attachments and pictures and the like – this is pretty vanilla stuff. Still, it is pretty convenient if all you want to do is check mail with minimum fuss. The only catch we could see is that viewing messages in this mode does not mark them as “read” if they happen to be new ones. All in all, it ends up giving one a chance to read a message while watching the inbox in the background – the sort of two-pane look that iPad users are enjoying. And that surely counts for something!
I think this is a nice tweak, just a little more ease on scanning your emails.