hey all,

Do you know a simple module to ad external links right into my Gmail. So far those have tried simply do not work. I simply want to add few formatted links to external services. Thank you

Are you talking about adding list of links somewhere in the webmail interface?
You can use the "Add any gadget by URL" Lab experiment (https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/labs) and then find iGoogle gadget that lets you specify a list of links, like this one:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&hl=en&gl=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Frandyscott777.googlepages.com%2FHyperlinks.xml

(You can find more gadgets at http://www.google.com/ig/directory)

yeh I do use the "Add any gadget by URL" option but the link you sent me does not work. It simply tells me I can't add it due to an invalid URL

Gmail-integral function Tasks works pretty well for storage of external links (though perhaps not in as compact form as you'd wish).

That said, what I miss most of all are INTERNAL links to messages. This is how I'd like it to work: each mail gets a clickable unique-ID permalink by default, visible/copyable when "Show details" invoked. If such a permalink is pasted into a msg, then invoked by another partygmail.com, AND the referenced item already resides in recipient's msg archive, it will be acted upon/displayed. If not, the link does nada.

A clarification to the above: internal links to arbitrary messages in the mailbox. Any two present conversations may be linked.

There's also room for alternative behavior when third partygmail.com receives a permalink to which it hitherto has not been privy: rather than doing nothing, the client could be configured to emit a request to sender to make the content of the referenced mail [though perphaps not its original recipients] available to the new correspondent. It'd be like adding a Cc- or Bcc-recipient after the fact. Above all, however, it'd allow creating named linked paths, in effect new "conversations" through mailbox data.

Ianf: You can just use a search that uniquely returns your mail. The URL of the search result can act as a permalink to any email in any account, which you can put inside the mail itself.

e.g.: https://mail.google.com/mail/?#advanced-search/from=me%40gmail.com&subset=all&has=the+subject+I+sent+you&within=1d&date=11%2F2011%2F2009

You can then put this in the email itself. (Of course, it's if you put a unique string in the email and enter a search URL for that.)

For your alternative behaviour – I think you really want to be using Wave :)

You're missing the point. I know I can search for any mail. But I don't want to search for each and every mail when I need it.

The [proposed] permalink should be there whether it is needed or not, ready to be extracted/copied. Furthermore it would be truly unique, not potentially applicable to more than a single message as might be the case with imprecise search keys. We all know it takes time to narrow down the scope of any search terms to emit just the sole result we're seeking.

As it is today, the closest to a single unique atom that every mail carries is its RFC822 date string, not the Message-ID [because that could be quoted elsewhere in "X-In-Reply-To" and other header strings, thus not unique]. Only it is hidden beneath a layer, and, once open in a separate source window, has to be visually identified first before it can be extracted for any pre-narrowed-down search op.

Is this you are proposing as an alternative to my idea of message permalinks-by-default?

All i'm asking is a simple bookmark gadget that would actually work in Gmail below my chat windows. I've tried a dozen, none work...

It's a neat concept, a list of easily-added and -removed bookmarks beneath the chat window in the left pane. Extracted presumably via a keyboard shortcut off any selected url in the msg window. But then one has to ask about the maximum capacity of that list, ability to edit? rearrange? and delete items. How many bookmarks would be enough.

Clearly, a list of more than ~25 bookmarks, one per line, would require some kind of scrolling, which would add yet another element to the Gmail UI. Also, to minimise amount of interaction, bookmarks would have to be saved with auto-shortened, potentially cryptic, non-editable anchor labels... or else there'd be more complexity still. Doesn't it sound more and more like a job for (a dedicated Gmail folder in) the browser's bookmarks list?

But let's say you'd be content with an UI similar to that of Quick Links, except that NEW bookmarks get inserted at the top, rather than at the bottom of a finite-length LIFO list. Think Google hasn't already tested that, and found less than useful?