Pimp Out Your Email

Last week, I did a post on making your Desktop look good. If you missed it, read Trick Out Your Desktop To Make It roductive. On a similar, but more vain note, today I am going to talk about making Gmail look good for you. These tweaks, though more of a cosmetic kind, will make your Gmail experience nicer, and more worthwhile.

First of all, switch to Firefox. It's one of the safest browsers around, and some of the tweaks mentioned here work best on it.

• Use a theme for your Gmail inbox: If you haven't done so yet, head over to the Settings  > Themes tab and select one of the many themes available for Gmail. You can also choose your own colors by clicking Choose Your Own Colors at the bottom. If a fixed theme is not your taste, select Random.
• Install the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension: Better Gmail 2 adds a lot of handy features to your Gmail tab in Firefox. It ad various features such as Row Highlights, Attachment Icons, Unread Count on Favicon, etc. Hit the link above to read the whole list and install it.
• Install Stylish for Firefox: Stylish is a really neat addon for Firefox. It lets you reconfigure the appearance of most websites, and theme it to appear differently. Themes can be installed from Userstyles or just right-click the Stylish icon in the status bar and select "Find Styles for this site". If you are good with CSS and Javascript, you can even code and upload it to the website (in case you do, mention it in the comments below). Mac fans can use the Snow Leopard theme here. Check out the screenshot below.
  

• Use Gmail Labs Features: If you have Gmail Labs enabled, you can simply use the Default Text Styling feature by going to Settings > Labs. After you enable it, go to Settings, scroll down and select how you want your text to appear. Do note that the style you set here will also be how your emails will appear to your recipients. So go a little easy on that shade of lavender that you love.

Incorporating these tweaks will surely help to make your Gmail experience droolworthy. In case you've always stuck to the POP/IMAP interface for Gmail because of Gmail's lacklustre default interface, maybe this will convince you to make the switch.

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