The new Opera 9.6 is out, so you might want to give it a whirl. I haven’t tried it yet, but as soon as I get a chance too I will. I’m hoping the speed enhancements are visible and I’m eager to give Opera Mail another go. Get the latest version from the Opera website.

As my friend Karl points out on Make Use Of, some of us are indeed not normal, and that’s the way (aha aha) we like it. His quick tutorial shows you a great productivity method of opening two separate versions of Outlook at the same time. If you need to quickly switch between two exchange servers, you’ve just struck golf. Find out how to do this on Make Use Of.

If you work on a lot of web projects on your site, you know you have to spell check, spell check and spell check. Nothing looks more unprofessional, and sadly, still very few take the time to go through their sites. Please don’t laugh, I know I probably have about a million, but I can just say that this is my own dialect! Take a look at Spellist, a website which takes your site and scans it for all mistakes it can find. It’s not the prettiest site, but it’s simple and fast, a great tool for webmasters out there. Thanks to Teknobnites for the find!

Gmail Labs has unrolled a new feature, called mail goggles. It’s a small feature that has you solve some math problems before it sends your email at times you specify. This is so that you don’t send emails late at night for example that you might regret later. Personally, I think this is a bit stupid, and for me it wouldn’t really work. However, some of you might find that it increases your productivity by NOT letting you do something!

One of the biggest problems I have with Gmail is the way you attach stuff. Gmail outperforms every other app with this exception, the time Outlook can save using drag and drop is totally lost with web based clients. gAttach is a lightweight application designed to change that, although as you will see, only in some cases.

The application allows you to use the “send to email” shortcuts in Windows to attach messages to Gmail messages (or Google Apps Mail). You select the files in Outlook, Windows Photo Gallery and most importantly the exporer interface (the Windows interface). It works much like Outlook, just select the files you need and click the email button, or send to email link via the right click context menu. A message will appear showing the attaching progress, you may need to log in, and the message will be saved as a draft. You can opt to access this draft immediately by launching Gmail, or to just save it as a draft without accessing it at once.

This is a huge, huge help in two cases. One is if you have a load of files to send someone, but you don’t want to zip them up. Even if you have 3-5 it may be more productive to use gAttach. This will save you the browsing and manual attaching you usually need to go through. The other case is when you want to create 5-6 drafts quickly with different attachments, or perhaps just save a backup copy for yourself on your Gmail server. In this case the fact that you do not need to access the interface all the time is a huge time bonus.

The only time I find that the app is of no use if you have 1-2 attachments to add and you want to send the email right away, which is most often the case for me. Since the files need to be attached, you may need to log in and the message is saved as a draft, Gmail is loaded in a new window so will need to load, this may take more time than actually just doing things through the Gmail interface.

Nevertheless, gAttach can save you a boatload of time if you have some serious attaching to do and I can heartily recommend it to anyone, it works like a charm, thanks to Freewaregenius for their great find.

When they rolled out some new features in Gmail a while back, they changed their link structure a bit. This enabled a lot of productivity short cuts, my favorite of which is the bookmarking of searches.

This week I have been working on Blogtastique orders and I have been searching for emails sent to my address, with some specifics inside. I won’t really use this all the time, so creating a label is not necessary, but this week I have performed this search about 50 times. If you have similar need, here’s a handy tip to help you save some time.

Perform the search you need, and bookmark the result page like you would any other page. Press CTR+D (for IE and Firefox) and type a description and place the bookmark. Now when you navigate to that bookmark you will automatically go to the results of that search.

What I love about it is that if you do this in the same tab as you normal Gmail interface Gmail won’t be loaded again, so the results pop up in about 2 seconds. This trick can save your minutes each day, it has saved me at least an hour this week!

Everyone’s favorite (I hope) online email client just got a face lift. Apart from some minor visual tweaks and a quicker interface, there have been a lot of subtle changes that should make our already easy Gmail life that but easier.

The official Gmail blog writers share some of their favorite ones, and I think they really did share the best ones. The star of the day seems to be the “archive and next” shortcut, a handy way to read a bunch of mail. Instead of reading your mail, going back to the inbox and reading the next, you can just press “archive and next” (or [ on the keyboard) and hey presto, the email is archived and you are moved on to the next.

My favorite feature, being the “all over the place” type of guy that I am is the browser history feature. How many times have I copy pasted a password, or phrase, closed the email, then realized 5 minutes later (after it’s no longer on the clipboard) that I need it again. Now you can navigate through Gmail using your browser history (click the small arrow beside your back and forward buttons), a great addition this one.

Take a look at the blog for a list of their top five features, but there are also many more, probably the most noticeable is the new contact manager interface and IMAP support, which is one of the best things since cotton candy and Ice Tea.

Found via The Official Gmail Blog