November 17, 2009: Gmail Notes Disabled by Google
The Gmail Notes menu disappeared because of an unannounced, undocumented change to Gmail that has disabled a number of Firefox extensions, including ours. We have been trying to contact Google to find out what is behind this change, and whether it is permanent or not. We are presuming the change is permanent, so we are now figuring out our best plan to move forward. We expect to get Gmail Notes back online by the end of December, 2009.
If it is of any help, we added a page to let you view the contents of your existing notes here, although you cannot edit, create, or delete them there. But we can also report that a couple very resourceful users figured out a workaround to let them create & edit notes in the interim. It is pretty awkward to use, but if you want to know how they do it, send an email to us here.
What is Gmail Notes?
Gmail Notes is a web application that adds annotations to Gmail. With Gmail Notes, you can create a private note for each conversation in your Gmail account. You can make a note to, for example, summarize the key points in a long conversation thread. Or to outline some thoughts for a follow up email or phone call. For a list of more ways to use Gmail Notes, see our Typical Uses page.
To use Gmail Notes, you start by installing a Firefox extension, which puts a small menu box in the Gmail navigation panel. You can get the Firefox extension at our Getting Started page.
From the Gmail inbox view, you connect to the Gmail Notes service using your standard Google account name and password. When viewing a Gmail conversation, you can open a popup window to view/edit an existing annotation or you can create a new one. One note can be saved for each conversation in your Gmail account. The annotation window provides a rich text editor so that you can highlight text, create lists, include links, etc. For more user interface details, including some screenshots, look at our Everyday Use page.
Gmail Notes is not an integrated feature of Gmail, but a separate web application running on the Google Application Engine Framework. So your annotations are stored separately from your Gmail data, although they are still in the Google infrastructure. And as a separate system, there are certain things that Gmail Notes cannot do. It cannot, for example, highlight which messages in your inbox have notes attached to them; you can easily do that using Gmail superstars, but you will have to do it manually. There are other limitations listed on our What It Doesn't Do page.
Gmail Notes is a free service open to any Gmail user.