What is Gmail Notes?
Gmail Notes is a web application for attaching private notes to your Gmail. With Gmail Notes, you can create a 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 places the application in the Firefox sidebar. You can see Gmail Notes in this screenshot. And you can get more info at our Getting Started page.
You can then connect to the Gmail Notes service using your standard Google account name and password. When viewing a Gmail conversation, you can view/edit an existing annotation in the sidebar, or you can create a new one. One note can be saved for each conversation in your Gmail account. The app 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 notes 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 labels or 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.
Latest News: Bug fix - text size menu
January 21, 2012
We pushed a new update to fix a bug with setting text size in the note editor. Previously, you could select the text size in the menu (small, normal, large, huge), but nothing changed in the note itself. We apologize to those that have lived without this feature. It turns out we missed a change in the base javascript library we use, Google Closure. FYI, a user notified us of the problem though the app's comment feature. It is tough to test for things like this, so we really appreciate the bug report.
We set a cache tag of 24 hours on the app, so you may not see this change immediately. If you suspect that you don't have the fix yet, you can (i) close Gmail Notes, (ii) clear your browser's cache, and then (iii) open Gmail Notes. To clear the browser cache, use the Firefox "Tools" --> "Clear Recent History..." menu item, and select the Cache item in the window.
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