I woke up today to find new Gmail buttons. At first I thought it was just Firefox playing tricks on me, but no, the buttons look the same in Safari. The Gmail Team announced the change on their blog yesterday, on 2/3/09. As expected, the change took a while to propagate to all of the Gmail accounts.

Along with the new buttons, they introduced two new keyboard shortcuts, “l” and “v”, which will allow you to label and label/archive messages on the fly. The “l” key opens a drop-down menu which allows you to label emails. You can navigate the drop-down menu using the arrow keys and mark a label using the Enter key. The “v” key does the same thing, and it also archives the message at the same time, removing it from the inbox.

Don’t forget that while you’re in the Gmail inbox, you can select multiple message by using the Shift key. Left-click on the first one, then Shift-Click on the last one, and all in-between will be selected. You can then use “l” or “v” to apply labels to all of them at once.