If there's one thing that Gmail isn't short of it's innovation, and the service's developers have just rolled out two new upgrades to keep things fresh.
First up is the ability to restore any contacts that you may have deleted at some point over the past 30 days. With so many devices having the ability to sync with Gmail's address book, it becomes increasingly likely that a botched exchange could cause some serious problems. With this feature, you can turn back the clock to any day within the past month - down to the exact minute - by selecting 'Restore' under the 'More actions' section of the contact manager.
Obviously all of your contacts will be restored to the state that they were in on that date, although this does mean that any new ones will be deleted. Thankfully, you can undo the action if you get the wrong date and try again if you need to. To be honest, we're not quite sure why Google is holding onto our contact data for a month after it's been deleted, but we're willing to overlook it, since the ability to restore to a backup is actually pretty handy.
The next change introduces e-mail delegation to Gmail. The feature - which has been available for Google Apps for some time - lets you grant access to an account from within another. While a few people will want to use this so that their PA can respond to their personal e-mails, the rest of us can use it to manage multiple Gmail accounts without ever having to log out.
Once you switch to using the delegated account, it's possible to view the inbox, read messages and respond on behalf - although not as - the delegated e-mail address. Both accounts will show up in different browser tabs or windows, so you should be able to have both open simultaneously. The feature can be enabled under the 'Accounts and Import' section in the Settings menu.
Both new features should be available to all Gmail users now.
