Email can be a lot of pressure. Anyone who has gone to work on a Monday morning and faced an inbox full of emails that require attention will agree with me. Since procrastination is a favorite human pastime, most people don’t want to reply to the e-mails received right away. In fact, most of us don’t even want to open them to see what is inside.

Thankfully, Gmail came up with a new feature that lets you take a sneak peek at your emails without opening them. This serves two purposes.

One, you don’t have to spend hours opening every email that you get. By taking a quick peek you can decide whether you want to tackle it right away or not. For example, when you are paying the bills online and you don’t want to reply to an email from your golf buddy.

Also, since the mails remain unopened, they remain highlighted as unread mails, reminding you to reply to them later.

To enable the Gmail Message Sneak Peek, Log onto your Gmail account and click on Settings over at the top right corner. Once you click on that, you will be presented with a page full of options, tabs and radio buttons.



Look for the tab towards the right which says Labs. Once you click on it, you will see another page, full of options. These Google folks are spoiling (and confusing) us with all these options.



Scroll down the list and find the option called Message Sneak Peek or simply press Ctrl+F to search, type sneak peek in the dialog box and press Enter.



Once you locate that option, click on Enable, scroll down the page and click on the Save Changes button. Once back in the Inbox, right click on any email message to preview it. Isn’t it great?



Another added benefit is that while previewing a message, you can Archive or Delete it in one easy click without opening the message at all. You can also mark it as unread, even if it’s been opened. Is this awesome or what?

This is ideal for people who deal with a lot of email, or for people who are just lazy like me and don’t want to open every single mail to see what’s inside. Once you start using it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

~Yogesh Bakshi