Google is making one of larger changes to Gmail it’s ever instituted. It’s an clutter-taming feature called Priority Inbox, and the company is apparently pretty sure people will love it: Rather than rolling it out as a Labs experiment, Google is turning on the feature for everyone right away. The company prebriefed me last week and has let me try it out for the past few days.

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I’ve been using Gmail’s new free voice calling feature over the past couple of days. For a while, I thought that the Google Buzz blowup proved it was a bad idea to introduce non-e-mail features into Gmail, period. Now I now that if it’s the right feature done the right way, it can make perfect sense.

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Small but useful new Gmail labs feature: the ability to search both Gmail and Google Docs with one click.

Microsoft has finished rolling out its new version of Hotmail. It’s got some clever clutter-busting features.

Looks like a Gmail feature I’d love may be on its way: The ability to jump between multiple accounts with a click.

For all those times that an e-mail sounds better in your head than it does to the recipient, ToneCheck thinks it can help.

The plug-in, which is in a free-for-now beta for Microsoft Outlook and coming to web-based mail services in the future, reads over your e-mails for emotions such as elation, humiliation, excitement and fear. Users can set thresholds for how much emotion to allow in their e-mails, and ToneCheck essentially acts like a spell checker, flagging words and phrases that might be interpreted the wrong way.

ToneCheck’s website has a demo that shows how it works, but I don’t use Outlook, so I haven’t tried the plug-in myself. If anyone tries it, I’d love to hear how well it works. On that note, it would be wise for ToneCheck to offer a web app in which people could dump text from any source, and if they were sufficiently happy, they could pay for the plug-in on their service of choice.

In general, my feelings about ToneCheck are somewhat similar to my feelings about SarcMark and Open Sarcasm, both of which are intended to express sarcasm as punctuation. For someone with decent writing skills, none of these tools are really necessary. I could see a computerized emotion catcher being downright annoying.

But at least ToneCheck isn’t a substitute for the written word, like SarcMark. It’s just a teacher, designed to stop people from writing e-mails they’ll regret later. If that makes the world — or your inbox — a better place, I’m all for it.

Totally Web-based applications don’t exactly spring to mind when you think about Apple. But that’s true in part because of its shockingly archaic approach to them: It wants you to–gasp!–pay $99 a year for Mobile Me, a bundle of mail, calendaring, photo sharing, storage, and “Find My iPhone.” Except for Find My iPhone, all of these services have solid free competitors; I’ve never been sure why anyone would pay Apple for something as readily available as e-mail.

Except…Apple has released a nice new version of Mobile Me Mail. Like its predecessors it has a nicely Apple-esque user interface. But it’s reasonably powerful, too, with features such as rules and the ability to handle external accounts. As before, it’s ad-free, which adds to the clutter-free feel. It feels like what Gmail might be if it were designed by Apple, and it’s worth checking out if you like slick Web apps. (Mobile Me offers a 60-day free trial.)

Microsoft has begun rolling out its smart new version of Hotmail, although it’s doing so bit by bit. (It doesn’t plan to have flipped the switch for every user until later this summer.) Lifehacker’s Adam Hachis has a nice look at where Hotmail now beats Gmail–and where it doesn’t.

When I wrote about the neat new version of Hotmail last month, I failed to mention one long-standing downside of the service: It adds a text ad for itself at the end of your messages, which makes it a non-starter for business use and a tad cheesy even if you’re just e-mailing pals and relatives.

Now Michael Arrington is reporting that Microsoft will kill off that tagline, starting today. Good news. If I were Microsoft, I’d also contemplate tweaks to the ad panel in the Hotmail interface–I get that it’s the ads that make Hotmail free, but Microsoft’s giant, distracting display advertisements make Hotmail feel fundamentally less serious and professional than Gmail’s text-based ad links.

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of e-mail users in the world: Those for whom bundling up a thread of messages into a “conversation” makes perfect sense, and those who would much rather have an inbox sorted in strictly reverse-chronological order. The Business Insider’s Henry Blodget among the latter type: Yesterday, he posted a testy item (one of several he’s lobbed) begging Google to let Gmail users opt out of conversation view. Then he followed up with good news: Two Google executives, who he refused to name, had written him to say that Gmail will get a “normal” view in the next few months.

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Nice review of the upcoming new Hotmail by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo.

The upcoming Hotmail upgrade looks like it’ll be the first Web-based mail client since Yahoo’s 2005 makeover with enough tangible benefits to make the idea of switching from another service worth contemplating, at least. Which got me to thinking: Do very many people really jump from one Webmail client to another these days?

Hotmail uses technology from TrueSwitch to import mail and contacts, so it should be possible for a Gmail user (for instance) to transition to Hotmail without too much in the way of technical challenges. Or you can use techniques such as POP access or forwarding to get e-mail from your old service into Hotmail without having to give up the old address.

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For several years, describing the competition between the three major Webmail providers as a race has failed to adequately capture what’s been going on. Google has been adding features to Gmail at a breakneck pace–sometimes several in one week–while Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have been ambling along as if they weren’t in it to win it. (At least in terms of quality–Yahoo Mail remains the most widely-used service in the U.S., with Hotmail in second place and the less-venerable Gmail still playing catchup.)

Now Microsoft is giving Hotmail–which is still the most popular service internationally–its first major makeover in a long time. The company expects to make the new version available in July or August; it gave me early access to a preliminary version. It’s not about aiming for feature parity with Gmail: The basics of Hotmail’s look and feel remain largely unchanged, and there are many, many useful Gmail features that have no counterparts, such as one-click archiving, a built-in task manager, and the ability to insert applets such as Google’s calendar gadget.

Judged on its own terms, though, this new Hotmail is appealing–and most of what’s new really is new, with no precise equivalent in Gmail. Hotmail also feels less densely packaged with stuff, I could see some folks preferring it to Gmail, which is beginning to flirt with bloat.  (Bonus point in Hotmail’s favor: You can now choose either a threaded inbox or a traditional flat one, a pleasant change from Gmail’s mandatory conversation view.) Continue reading this story…

At last fall’s TechCrunch50 conference, my personal best-of-show was probably Threadsy. It’s an integrated inbox that gives you access to multiple e-mail accounts, Twitter, and your Facebook inbox all in one place–and weaves them together, so, for instance, you can view a bio, updates, and photos for the person who sent you an e-mail message. (That feature reminds me of the Outlook plugin Xobni.)

Back then, I called Threadsy an intriguing first draft. Now it’s addressed some of my initial concerns: For instance, it supports folders (Labels in Gmail parlance), making it a plausible full-time or part-time replacement for your current e-mail client rather than a severely limited compliment. And Threadsy finally moved from private beta into general availability yesterday, so anyone who’s interested can give it a try.

Threadsy could still use some more polishing (it has a neat photo viewer, but I’m finding the photos are sometimes partially obscured by misplaced text). And it’s still impossible to be a better Gmail than Gmail (when I’m in Threadsy, I miss features like the Google Calendar widget and the ability to open up attachments in Google Docs). Overall, though, it’s inventive and useful–if you try it out, let us know what you think.

My new 21.5” iMac arrived on Friday. I spent the weekend transferring files from my old machine and installing the applications that I wanted. The experience was overwhelmingly positive, but it wasn’t as seamless as it could have been.

Unpacking and setting up the machine was a breeze, and its quality was excellent-even though I purchased it from Apple’s refurbished Mac store. (I saved around $200.)  The machine booted up, instantly recognizing the wireless keyboard and mouse. It then asked me if I wanted to migrate from another machine.

I lacked the necessary cable, so I opted not to use the transfer wizard; I had already shared folders on my old Mac. Files transferred over the air through my home network, and everything went smoothly–until I tried to set up my machine for work.

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Remember reMail, the clever iPhone app that let you store massive amounts of e-mail on your phone and search it instantly? Google was apparently impressed–reMail founded Gabor Cselle, a former Gmail engineer, has announced news he says he’s “thrilled” by: Google has bought reMail and he’ll be rejoining the Gmail team.

And then he shares news that doesn’t sound all that thrilling to me: Google has discontinued reMail and yanked it off the iPhone App Store. Previously-downloaded copies will still work, and users of the free version can get all the features of the paid edition. But Google will stop supporting the app at the end of next month, and there will never be another update. Starting today, reMail is a Dead App Walking.

Oddly enough, Cselle says all this on a blog with a profile that says that (A) reMail exists to radically improve mobile e-mail; and (B) it hasn’t launched yet. That’s out of date on both fronts: It did launch–in beta form, at least, to an enthusiastic reception–and it won’t be improving e-mail from here on out.

Cselle doesn’t explain why Google is killing reMail. It’s possible that the company remained impressed by Cselle and wasn’t interested in reMail itself. But it’s also conceivable that it sees reMail as the foundation of an ambitious Gmail app, and that everything that was cool about reMail will reappear at some point in a new form. We just don’t know, and Google doesn’t seem to be dropping hints.

The search-engine behemoth has acquired an infinite number of interesting startups over the years. In certain cases, that’s been good news for fans of the products those companies made–Google Earth (nee Keyhole 3D Earth Viewer) and Picasa spring to mind. (Oh, and YouTube.) And Google says that the neat Q&A service Aardvark, which it bought last week, will live on as a Google Labs project.

Unfortunately, though, what’s good news for Google and startup founders is often a bummer–at least in the short term–for everyone else who cared about the startup in question.