There's a lot of good stuff in Google's major Gmail[1] update. These include high-priority notifications, confidential mode, and better offline support. The bad news is many of the best features aren't here yet. Here's what you can put to work now.
Smart Reply[2] is a feature that's been available in the Gmail mobile version since 2017. Smart Reply works by using Google machine learning to suggest three responses to your emails. You can ignore them, pick one and hit send, or choose one and add additional text. The more you use it, the better the suggestions you'll get.
These tend to be generic replies such as "Thanks!" or "I'm working on it now". It's not much, but sometimes all you need is a quick, pithy reply.
Another new option is to snooze emails[3]. This is another feature that Google has shown off before, having first appeared in the Google Inbox[4] mobile app. With it, you can set a message so that it pops up later when you have time to deal with it.
This isn't just ignoring a message -- you and I can both do that without any help. Instead it hides the message in the "Snoozed" inbox until you're ready to deal with it. The message will return at the time designated when you snoozed it. Your default choices are tomorrow, next weekend, next week, or you can pick a specific time for it to pop up again. You can also choose to snooze until "someday", which means it's shoved into the Snooze mail box until you get around to looking at it again.
You can snooze a message from the message view panel or from the inbox. In