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Gtriage is a new service that aims to help Gmail users suffering from "information overload" due to an overcrowded inbox - a problem affecting the majority of email users today. The way the service works is that it scans all your email messages and to determine which ones are the most important to you. It then tags those messages "Important" with bright red labels so they don't get missed.

This sounds brilliant, doesn't it? The only question now is will it actually work?

Back in April 2009, Google introduced Google Search, a little-known feature in Gmail labs that allows users to search Google without ever leaving the Gmail interface. Today, Google announced that it is improving this feature with a number of useful new functions. Google Search in Gmail can now access most of the more advanced features of Google Search, including dictionary definitions, spelling corrections, calculations, weather and local search. In addition, Google is now also highlighting these new features through an additional button in the Gmail toolbar.

Google has announced that Gmail will now operate using HTTPS, a secure connection between a browser and a server, by default. Previously, users could turn on HTTPS connections as the default in their settings, but the situation has now been reversed.

Google said that after taking a look at the trade-off between speed and security - the primary concern in this case - they decided that it was worth it to the end-user to automatically use a secure connection.

MailBrowser wants to make Gmail and Google Apps more useful by offering a consolidated view of all your contacts and attachments in a browser sidebar. In this sidebar, you can quickly search for contacts, see the latest emails you received from a specific contact, add calendar events and attach notes and tags to a contact. In many respects, MailBrowser looks a lot like Xobni for Gmail.

This morning Google announced that "offline Gmail" is leaving the Gmail Labs testing area and will be implemented as a standard feature for all users. Once enabled, this feature allows you to access your Gmail even when no internet connection is available. You can read and respond to messages, star them or label them just as you would if you were online. When a connection is restored, all the changes you made are synced with Google's servers and any messages in your Outbox are sent out.

As of today, all Gmail users will now have this feature turned on by default, however those who have never used it before will need to configure it first in order to take advantage of the enhanced functionality.

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.

Google just announced dramatically reduced prices for their online storage options via a post on the company's Official Google Blog. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it "twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price." The new options also let you expand your storage all the way up to 16 TB if need be. As always, these extra storage options are available once you reach the limit of your free storage.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

GMail is rolling out a new feature to some users that makes it easy to import contacts and archived emails from other email accounts, with other providers, into your Gmail account. The feature is powered by a 3rd party service called TrueSwitch and it really is a breeze. The feature was announced this Spring but the roll out has been slow and many users are seeing it for the first time today. Some still don't see it.

Users are required to give TrueSwitch (through a Gmail interface) the username and password for the old account, then import can take a few hours or days. I pulled in contacts from an old Hotmail account and am now waiting to have them arrive in my Gmail contacts list.

Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.

The problem with most contact management tools is that only a portion of your acquaintances are considered useful. Meanwhile, unconventional contacts like PTA parents, yoga partners and softball teammates remain invisible. Social graphing software PeopleMaps aims to change that. Similar to LinkedIn, the tool allows users to leverage their networks to gain access to new leads. In addition to importing professional connections from LinkedIn, PeopleMaps also provides a visual map of connections imported from Facebook, Gmail and Outlook.