Mini-productivity tip: send a Gmail without getting distracted by your inbox

I do this too:) I've aliased this to the keyword "sendmail" in chrome by adding it as a search engine in preferences, so I can just type "sendmail" or "sendmail email@example.com" in the url bar.<p>However, an even higher win for me is aliasing search in the same way. I used to find that when I went into my email to look for a particular piece of info I would get so distracted by my inbox that I never ended up completing the task I was originally working on. I've aliased <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/&#60;searchterm&#62" rel="nofollow">https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/&#60;searcht...</a>; to "ms &#60;searchterm&#62;", such that I can type "ms paypal" in my url bar and get all my recent paypal receipts without having to be tempted by my inbox first:)<p>My only frustration is that gmail is still so damn slow to load. I know they've spent a lot of time trying to make this fast (I spent about 2 years working on reducing latency on Google search), but they're still so far away from where they could be.<p>I really, really wish gmail loaded the html first, showing my inbox or search or whatever, and then loaded and attached all the javascript later. This could result in search level latencies for the initial load of data for the user to start looking at, even if it took a while longer to be fully interactive.

I used to have <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#compose" rel="nofollow">https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#compose</a> bookmarked to avoid needing 2 steps to write a mail, but then Gmail came out with their new compose box. But the above lets you avoid the sidebar entirely..

Thanks! That's a really cool tip! There are so many interesting features that Gmail (and many other Google products) has to offer. My favorites are everything that goes on behind the hood.