Gmail chat tips and tricks round up

Lets do some Gmail Tips and hacks round up today. Mostly about gmail chat and other unknown features that you might not know about.

Use IMAP.
To find if someone has blocked you, do“Get info” in pidgin, if you get blank, then you have been blocked otherwise you will get some info for sure, if he is just offline.
Use alternate XMPP clients like pidgin, to set your status to away even when you are *not*.
If you use pidgin, you can find out where from your buddy is online from. You would see some additional Strings like: Talkv12348236356 or gmail.3232344 or something else, like Office326532A6 or BaseStation73246BVF etc. This indicates client being used and the number is usually same for a particular client. Hence, Talk.XX… means buddy using gTalk, gmail.XX… means, he’s online from a browser window, the rest without the dots, indicating the client is an XMPP client. For e.g. If I am at office you’d see my status as Office326532A6 or when I am at home, you’d see BaseStation73246BVF. I can of course customize these strings with whatever I want using my client e.g. pidgin. Also, if you buddy is online from different locations, you’d see status IDs for all the locations he’s online from.
To mark a single mail in a thread as new , this is not possible normally as if you select a mail and mark it as new, entire thread is marked as new. The trick is to delete all other mails in the thread, then mark the mail as unread and then move back other mails from the thread from Trash back to Inbox.

The story about Gmail chat windows: The chat windows follow a basic principle that it would be maximized in a single browser window. So, if you are chatting in a particular browser window, the chat window in all other browsers (where you are concurrently logged in) would minimize. If you maximize somewhere else, the window would minimize everywhere else.
Use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, they are fast and efficient.
Gmail now shows you your last account activity, down at the bottom. It lets you know your last 5 login details, IPs and browsers used to login.
You can install an extension called Gmail Drive using which you can store your files online at gmail servers. The drive would mount as a normal external drive.
Evolution can integrate its address book with your Pidgin (hence gmail) buddies. It even shows you their avatars along with their mails, when they mail you.
Use Google calendar as your primary calendar. Google calendar, integrates efficiently with most email clients. For e.g. evolution, thunderbird. Imagine right clicking on a mail, and saying “convert to a meeting” to exporting it to your gmail calendar. Further you can add people to the meeting. Gnome calendar goes a step further to show all calendar events (even google calendar) right in your desktop calendar.