Gmail Adds Emoticons, Canned Responses & Updates Mobile Client

The Gmail team has been busy over the last few days. They have added emoticons to mail messages, created a new labs project for canned responses and updated their mobile client for J2ME-supported phones and Blackberry devices.

The emoticons are new to Gmail messages, but not new to Google Talk. Google has not only added emoticons to mail messages, but has also added the number of emoticons available in Google Talk. Here are pictures of all the emoticons currently available:

The canned responses addition looks very neat. You can set up certain rules based on Gmail filters and then send automated replies to users. So if you are sick and tired of link exchange emails, you can set up a rule that looks for the phrase “link exchange,” or “link trade” and so on and then send an automated email back that reads something to the effect of:

Thank you for your link exchange request. Although we do not feel our site is an appropriate link exchange for your site, you may want to review mattcutts.com/blog and request a link from that blog.

Finally, Gmail has released a new mobile Gmail client for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. The new client is “designed to be more reliable in low signal areas and provides basic offline support for phones like the Nokia N95, Sony Ericsson W910i, and BlackBerry Curve.” You can also manage multiple Gmail accounts in the same client, including Google App accounts. You can download the new client at m.google.com/mail.