Now, it’s official – Gmail has some new features including Meet integration

Google has been steadily working on improvements to many of its platform offerings for some time. There is a particular focus on the steadily growing YouTube Music, as well as other general tweaks to functionality across the board. Adding to some recent changes, Gmail on Android and desktop will see a couple of useful tweaks in the near future that is worth taking a quick look at

We caught a peek of these the other day, but now the announcement is official.

Meet in Gmail on Android

Google’s G Suite team put out a blog post outlining the delivery of Meet in Gmail. The additional functionality will be a tab in Gmail that allows users to either create or join meetings from within the Gmail app.

The roll-out of Meet in Gmail has already begun, as yet not appearing on any of my devices though. It’s scheduled to be finished by the 4th of August and will be available to all users (with some admin requirements for G Suite Education users).

Verified Brand Logos in your message list

The premise is simple, through the use of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) Gmail will add Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). As noted by the team at 9 to 5 Google, there’s a lot more to this though as there are a number of areas of concern to be addressed. It would be egg on the face of Google to present a Google logo next to a spam email that is phishing for your login and password.

PSA: Reputable companies will never contact you by email asking for your username and password, don’t hand it over!

Having already used this feature in mail clients myself, it’s a really quick and easy way to identify the source of an email. Depending on the individual you’re getting an email from, if they have a profile picture setup you may also get that as the icon.

All told, these are a couple of nice little tweaks to the Gmail capability for heavy users. Casual users will probably notice the BIMI addition, but think little of it.

What features would you like to see added to Gmail — desktop or mobile — to increase it’s functionality for your usage?