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.

Basic Steps for Using Gmail Notes

  1. If you haven't installed the Gmail Notes extension for Firefox, go to the Getting Started page and do that first.

    2. Connecting to the Gmail Notes Server:

  2. After you install the Firefox extension and reload your Gmail page, the Gmail Notes menu will appear in the navigation panel, just below the "Contacts" menu item. (There are occasions when this doesn't "work" on the first attempt, and you might have to reload several times before you see the menu.) On initial startup, the Gmail Notes menu has a single item, "Sign In".

    Initial Client Menu

  3. Click the "Sign In" menu item, and a Google account Sign In window will pop up on your screen. It looks like this:

    Google Sign In Window

  4. Enter your Gmail address and account password. Note — the Gmail Notes servers do not see this information — it goes directly to Google. If the sign in is successful, the menu will update to show your Gmail address and number of notes. If you use more than one Gmail account, please make sure this address matches the Gmail account you are currently using.

    Signed In Client Menu

    GOOGLE APPS USERS PLEASE NOTE: If you access Gmail through a Google Apps Account, you still have to sign in to Gmail Notes with a "standard" Google Account. Sorry, but this is a limitation of the Google authentication system. To use Gmail Notes, we recommend you create a standard Google Account using your Google Apps email address, which you can do here.


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    Creating and Editing Annotations:

  5. Now that you are signed in to Gmail Notes, you can begin creating annotations! One downside of Gmail Notes is that you can only create annotations from the Gmail conversations view. So click one of the conversations in the list to open it. When you do that, the Gmail Notes menu changes to look like this:

    Client Conversation Menu

  6. To create an annotation, click the "Open Note" menu item. When you do that, a small editor is displayed in a popup window. That window looks like this:

    Note Editor for New Note

  7. You can now begin typing text into that window. At the very top you can enter a text-only "headline" that will be displayed as a tooltip in the Gmail Notes menu (when you hover over the "View/Edit Note" line). Below that is a rich text editor for the main body of your note. The toolbar can be used to format the text, in the same way you can format a Gmail message. Here's an example of what you can do:

    Note Editor With Content

  8. At the bottom-left of the annotation window, there are three tabs labeled "View", "Edit", and "Html". Because there was no annotation originally assigned to your Gmail message, the annotation window started with the "Edit" tab selected. You can click the "View" tab to see what the text looks like when you are not editing; the main difference is that any links are now "active", in other words, if you click links they will load the referenced page. And for those really into the nuts and bolts, you can click the "Html" tab to see the raw html markup. Here's an example of the "View" tab. It doesn't look much different, except that the toolbar is gone.

    Annotation Window's View Tab

  9. After you close the annotation window, the menu will be updated from "Create Note" to "View/Edit Note", to indicate that a note exists for this conversation. The headline will also be displayed, in tooltip fashion, when the mouse hovers over the menu.

    Headline Display

  10. If an annotation already exists for a given Gmail message, the annotation window will open with the "View" tab selected instead of the "Edit" tab. The window for existing annotations also includes a dropdown menu for "More Actions":

    • Revert Changes to reload the message from the server, throwing away any changes you made in the editor.
    • Delete Note to delete the annotation, removing it from the Gmail Notes server.
    • Print Note to, no surprise, send the annotation to the printer.


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    Marking Annotated Conversations:

  11. After you finish editing your annotation and close the annotation window, we STRONGLY recommend that you to apply a Gmail star to highlight the message, in order to denote that an annotation was created. (You can also assign a label for annotated messages, of course, but we find that less convenient.) We further recommend that you enable Gmail Superstars, a Gmail Labs feature that extends the "starring" system to support up to 12 different icons to flag important messages. We sure wish Gmail Notes could automatically assign one of the superstar types to messages with annotations, but the Gmail API doesn't give us access. So you have to do it manually. We like the blue-info star (see the screenshot below), but you can use whatever you like, of course.

    Client With Blue Info Superstars

  12. That's it. You can now create new notes, edit them, save them, view them, and delete them.



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