Google adds two new features to Gmail Labs today: The often-requested Nested Labels—for those of you who like folder-style label nesting—and "Message Sneak Peek", which provides a quick look at an email when you right-click the message in your inbox.


Nested Labels work like so:

[L]et's say you wanted to create a simple hierarchy with a "Home" label, and inside it a "Family" and a "Vacation" label. Just create three labels with the following names: Home

Home/Family

Home/Vacation You can then create "Home/Family/Kids," "Home/Pets," etc., to get something like the screenshot [above]. If you had the parent label "Home" before you don't have to create it from scratch. You can create complex hierarchies of labels if that's the way you like to organize your mail, and you can expand/collapse labels to save space. You'll always be able to tell whether a given label contains unread messages in its collapsed child labels by looking at whether it's bold or not.


The Message Sneak Peek feature is simple enough. Once enabled, you can right-click any message in your inbox for a quick inline preview.

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The message won't be marked as read unless you take action on it, so it's a good way to take a quick look and decide whether or not you want to tackle what lies inside the email. Keyboard shortcut lovers, you can quickly peek at any email with the new 'h' shortcut.

To turn on either feature, head to your Gmail Labs settings, find "Nested Labels" or "Message Sneak Peek", enable the feature you'd like to try out, and click the Save Changes button.


For those of you familiar with Gina's Better Gmail Firefox extension, you're probably aware that nested labels have been a feature in that extension for quite a while using the Folders4Gmail userscript. Guess that's one more cool Gmail feature that you don't need an extension to use.

New in Labs: Nested Labels and Message Sneak Peek [Official Gmail Blog]