Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

A new feature arrived in Gmail over the weekend, and despite a pretty banal sounding name, it does seem interesting.  Anyway, officially the feature is called “Sponsored mail with enhanced content” which sounds really official and sort of like something that will end up giving us more ads to stare at try and ignore.

Thankfully this is not going to be bringing more ads for everyone.  It adds an “interactive gadget” which appears to be a fancy name for a favicon, along with the email message which will appear on the subject line just to the left of the time the email was received.  What it will do is actually pretty neat; it will allow you to interact with the website without leaving Gmail. 

So far I have not seen a full listing of sites that would be sending mail with a favicon, but according to the description it sounds like Babycenter will be participating.  Additionally, I have seen a few reports that also mention Netflix.  In terms of Netflix it looks like users will be able to do things like view and/or add movie recommendations to their queue.

Like I mentioned earlier, this feature will not be bringing ads to everyone.  In order to see these favicons you will need to be on the sender’s mailing list and that sender will have to be part of the program.  Of course, in the good Google way, you can also choose to disable these if they are bothering you.  To turn this feature off:

“just open a message and click the down-arrow in the upper-right corner of the message and select Do not customize mail from [sender].”

Read [Gmail Help] Via [Google Operating System]