There was some news yesterday about Gmail adding some new features to their system. Not all users received them right away, but I just now got them.

First, there's a new interface for contacts, which you now access from the sidebar. When you select a contact, you see a list of messages from that user below the contact information box. When you click Edit, you now have an option to Add more contact info, which brings up a very customizable detail editing system. You start off with two sections: Personal and Work, and you have the option to add, remove, and rename any sections. In each section, you have a list of fields. Initially you have Phone and Email, but you can add more and change the field names through a drop-down list that contains Phone, Mobile, Fax, Pager, Email, IM, Company, Title, and Other. Followed by the fields is a larger text field for Address.

Google followed through on their promise not to hold your e-mail hostage, and there is now a very usable automatic forwarding feature. You can set an option to forward all incoming mail to a particular address, along with an option for what to do with the original e-mail (keep in inbox, archive, or move to trash). Additionally, you can now set filters to automatically forward matched e-mails.

The one feature that I don't see is the much talked-about Atom feed that some received yesterday. I heard there were problems with it, such as some aggregators couldn't parse it. I don't know if they ditched the idea entirely or just postponed it until it's improved, but I was really looking forward to trying it out. Oh well.

The New Features section of the help has yet to be added at this point.

Update 2005.10.5: The atom feed is currently available here: Atom feed. Since Google removed the feed icon, they might remove or change this feature soon, so don't rely on it.