New Delhi: Google has made some changes to its settings which lets anyone with a Google+ account send emails to Gmail users, and vice versa, unless the recipient has opted out.
The feature appears as you begin typing your contact's name in the “To” field of an email message. Matching contacts display first at the top of the list of suggestions provided by Gmail's autocomplete, while your Google+ connections appear below.
Becuase of complications related to privacy and the possibility of overwhelming the inboxes of more public figures, Google has at least put controls in place that allow you to specify who can send you emails.
You can choose from “No one” to continue on as normally, or open things up a bit wider by choosing from “Circles,” “Extended Circles,” or even “Anyone on Google+.”
But there's a catch too: strangers can only email you once using the Google+ feature. If you don't reply or add them to your circles, they won't be able to keep spamming you. Further, if someone who's not in your Google+ circles uses the service to email you, it will go to your "Social" tab in Gmail rather than your "Primary" tab, provided you have tabs enabled.
The move taken by Google is a further step in the direction of integrating its Google+, a two-and-a-half-year old social network that has 540 million active users, with its other services. When consumers sign up for Gmail, the company's Web-based email service, they are now automatically given a Google+ account.
"Have you ever started typing an email to someone only to realize halfway through the draft that you haven't actually exchanged email addresses?" the company said in a blog post announcing the feature. "You're in luck, because now it's easier for people using Gmail and Google+ to connect over email."
