Google has added new "quick action" buttons to Gmail so people can deal with messages without opening them
In its ongoing efforts to simplify Gmail's inbox management, Google has rolled out more buttons to let people perform common actions without having to open messages.
The new batch of "quick action buttons," as Google calls them, let users rate restaurants they ordered food from using Seamless, change restaurant reservations made with OpenTable, open Dropbox folders and launch Google Docs files.
Google already offered buttons for rating restaurants, viewing flight information, renewing magazine subscriptions and responding to event invitations.
The company is encouraging website and Web app developers to learn how they can add these and other action buttons to the emails they send to Gmail users.
Taming email overload remains a challenge for many users, and webmail providers like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo regularly add tools to their services for filtering, prioritizing, organizing and sorting inbox messages.
In May, Google introduced a redesigned inbox for Gmail that sorts incoming messages into different tabbed categories, diverting messages from social media sites and commercial offers into Social and Promotions categories, respectively.
Gmail also detects dates within the body of email messages and asks users if they wish to create a Google Calendar entry.
A few years ago, Google launched its Priority Inbox technology for Gmail, designed to automatically assign different levels of importance to messages, and based on that give them more or less prominence in the inbox.
Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.
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