Gmail will now let you import email and contacts from other email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL (and a bunch more. Full list at the bottom of the article). This means that if you have an old account that you’d like to merge into your Gmail account, you can do so.

It also means (and this is what Google is pushing for) that users of other services can easily start new Gmail accounts without abandoning everything they have built up with another provider. Google is making the switch more enticing.

Google is in the process of releasing an upgrade to its Android mobile platform in version 1.5. Google is emphasizing the ability to upload YouTube videos right from your mobile phone.

Naturally, this makes it simple to record a video and upload it instantly. "What’s more, YouTube gives me full control of my privacy, so I can decide if I want to make my videos available to the entire Web or just a subset of invited friends," says Android Team Product Marketing Manager Jonathan Matus.

Google has recently launched a standalone contacts manager, which lets you manage your contacts outside of Gmail. This would be particularly useful for those who don’t use Gmail, but use other Google products that offer sharing capabilities.

If you use Google Docs, Picasa, or Google Calendar for example, you can now update people’s contact information without having to use Gmail. This was not an option before.

Google has released a new Gmail Lab that adds a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. When you turn on the lab (simply called Google Search) , you’ll get a search box on the left side of your inbox that looks like this:

Back in October, Google added a number of new emoticons for Gmail in a Gmail Lab. That round even went so far as to include a pile of feces complete with flies buzzing around it. I wish I was making this up.

A while back, Google introduced a viewer in Gmail for PDFs, and that has now been improved upon to support TIFF and PowerPoint documents. This means you can view PDFs, PPTs, and TIFFs in Gmail right from your browser without having to save them or have any additional software.

Marc Miller on the Gmail notes that Gmail has had a "view as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while, but the conversion technology is now integrated into this viewer.

It has been discovered that Google Profiles are now letting users enable the option to create a vanity URL. In other words, if you check a box, your Google profile page will become htp://www.google.com/profiles/whatever-your-gmail-name-is.

In a roundabout way, the use of Gmail is about to become much more common in the UK.  Virgin Media and Google announced a deal this morning that’ll allow four million home broadband customers to benefit from the service’s perks while using either new or existing email addresses. 

While Microsoft struggles with branding issues as it looks to gain some ground against Google, Yahoo is worried more about its social activities and how it stacks up against the social networks of the web.

In the neverending quest to improve what I think of as Google’s real social network, the company has released a couple of new features in Gmail Labs that can be integrated into the regular Gmail experience when activated.

Google has updated its Gmail for mobile product running on iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2.1 and Android phones. Gmail’s new “engine” offers faster email, navigating and searching, as well as some new functionality.

Google says the improvements were made possible by “aggressive caching" and leveraging new technologies like HTML5 and Gears.

The Past

Google’s email service Gmail was launched to the public five years ago this week. Back then, the service turned the web email industry on its ear by offering an entire gigabyte of storage to users who were lucky enough to receive an invite. Small potatoes now, but that was a nice chunk of storage from an email service back then.

Google introduced a new lab for Gmail today that improves the search feature. The new Search Autocomplete lab is basically like Google Suggest for your inbox. Start typing in the searchbox, and it gives you suggestions.

Google has added a new feature in Gmail Labs that allows users to retrieve email messages.

A new Undo Send button will hold an email for five seconds after the user clicks send. Google says the purpose of this feature is to allow users to recall emails that were sent to the wrong person, have the wrong subject heading or are missing a file attachment.

Gmail has been all about improving usability lately. Most recently they’ve announced a big improvement in this area fixing a problem that has annoyed countless emailers including Googlers themselves.

You know how when you get more than one conversation going based on one message, you don’t always have time to read each new one? It can get pretty confusing when trying to remember which ones still need to be read when you go back to them. If you mark the whole thing as unread, then you have to wade through the ones you’ve already read.

It appears that they never sleep at Gmail. After the most recent improvement in conversation-saving with the service, they have now added the ability to preview YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, and Yelp content with a new Gmail Labs experiment.

Back in December, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail Labs called "Tasks" that provides Gmail users with a window to keep track of their…tasks (go figure). Today, they have announced a couple new features for Tasks.

Users can now easily move a task (along with its sub-tasks) to another list by clicking on the arrow (or using Shift-Enter) to the right of the task, then selecting another list in the drop down at the bottom of the screen.

Social sites may be surpassing email in usage, but some fairly surprising data from Hitwise shows that visits to Gmail have surpassed visits to YouTube. The news comes at a time when Gmail can use some good news as complaints about downtime have recently mounted.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail must be looking pretty tempting to certain Gmail users right now.  Yet another Gmail outage has occurred, and once again, there’s been little official word regarding causes, effects, and timetables.

Google has created a new feature in Gmail Labs that allows Gmail users to import and export filters. It lets you download a file containing some or all of your filters or upload one to create a set of filters.

Software Engineer Luke Blanshard shares the following uses for the feature at the Gmail Blog:

Gmail chat has come to iGoogle. This means users will be able to chat with their friends and associates without leaving the comfort of their Google homepage.

The feature is not a gadget like most of your iGoogle features. The chat feature comes in the form of a sidebar and resides below the left-hand navigation menu.