Google has announced the ability to enable an email preview pane on its popular and widely used Gmail service. This feature is not unique, as Microsoft Outlook and other webmail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo utalize this feature already.
“When I check my email, I often rely on the message snippets to figure out which messages to open first. Sometimes, though, I want to see more than snippets, which is why I’m happy to announce that you can now preview messages in your inbox using a new feature in Gmail Labs called Preview Pane. It’s probably a very familiar layout to those of you who have used Gmail on a tablet device. We also think it’s going to work especially well if you have a larger resolution screen,” said Maciek Nowakowski, a Google Associate Product Manager.
The preview pane can be viewed as a “horizontal split” or “vertical split” by clicking the toggle button in the upper right-hand corner. Google has mentioned that emails would be marked as “read” after a three-second delay, which can be adjusted in the settings.
Hotmail, on the other hand, does not have default preview pane but can be configured via its options to be displayed on the right side or on the bottom of the screen. Yahoo Mail also has the ability to show a preview pane, but you must enable it in its options.
To enable this feature: go to the Gmail Labs tab, and select the “Preview Pane” option.
