It was recently confirmed that the new Gmail will contain a 'Confidential Mode' which will allow users send emails that will be destroyed after a set period of time.

This is cool and all, but there are still significant questions that need to be answered around compatibility and security.

The good news is that there are a bunch of alternative email clients that offer far more features and privacy.

Gmail is about to get a major facelift with a bunch of new features and an updated user interface. But along with many cosmetic changes come others that will chnage the way we use email. Among the updates that will be coming, you'll be able to mark messages as confidential which will give you lots of power over how email is handled.

If you use Gmail and Google Calendar, planning an event over email should be easy, but it can be annoying to jump back and forth between the two apps to check your availability. Now, it looks as though Google finally has a solution to this first-world problem, and you'll find it in a major update coming to Gmail's desktop view.

There comes a time when enough is, quite simply, enough. I had been putting off the task of organising my sprawling Gmail inbox for months, if not years. But when Lifehacker told me that we were going to have a Spring Cleaning week, I knew it was time. And I wasn't going to waste precious hours trying to find apps or tools to do the task for me. I needed to Ron Swanson my inbox -- roll up my sleeves, jump in, and manage the mess manually.

With one accidental click, anyone you email from your Gmail account can see your old Google+ profile.

It can be hard to start an email, but it feels even worse when you're going insane after sending the same canned response to a question for the ninth time this week. If you'd like a little help replying to the messages in your ever-growing inbox, EasyEmail uses machine learning (along with your email data) to auto-generate potential replies you're too lazy to type yourself. (Whether the Chrome extension's features are worth a mild invasion of privacy is up to you.)

Two-step verification is great. However, if you happen to lose your phone and don't have a few backup codes on you then it can make finding your device on the fly a bit complicated. You can score backup codes whether you use SMS or an Authenticator app for verification (you should really be using an Authenticator app), and carrying them with you can help get you out of a bind if your phone ends up MIA.

A long, long time ago, having a good password was all you needed to make sure your Gmail (or other online) account was secure. Now, if you don't have two-factor authentication, or 2FA, then you're missing out on a really simple way to protect yourself. Why, then, do less than 10 per cent of Gmail users have 2FA enabled? Great question.

Gmail and Google Calendar integration is an embarrassment. Gmail can never recognise all the crucial event info, and to fix it you have to open up Google Calendar in a new tab, defeating the purpose. Thankfully there are third-party fixes, such as Pod for Gmail, which recognises event info and loads it into a full calendar event right inside your Gmail window.

Apple keeps giving us reasons to say goodbye. iOS 11 is buggy as hell, with the most recent error making iPhones almost unusable and the latest version of macOS briefly exposed Mac owners to a major vulnerability. As for the iPhone X, it may be pretty sleek for an iPhone, but Apple's still playing catch-up to its Android competition.

Google has updated their iOS email client to support the new screen resolution and aspect ratio of the iPhone X and added support for third-party email services. This overcomes a longstanding problem as Google recognises that they aren't the only email provider on the planet.

Evernote has a bit of a malware problem. For the past few years (starting in early 2014) spammers have been sending fake emails that claim to come from the note-organising service but include links to install malicious software on your computer.

Every morning, the first thing I do is launch Gmail on my computer. While I use a ton of different tools for work, everything starts with my email - it's sort of a hub for getting everything done. And starting today, Gmail can be even more of a hub, thanks to the launch of Gmail Add-ons.

There are a lot of options out there to send secure and self-destructing messages to others. But what if you really just want to send them a message using Gmail? Snapmail is a Chrome extension that allows you to send messages just like you might otherwise, only they will destruct in 60 seconds.

Big fans of the cloud as we are, there's no doubt relying solely on keeping your stuff stored remotely is a risky strategy. Accounts get hacked. Companies fold. And if you don't have backups of your most precious Snapchats and Gmails, then they can disappear in a puff of data center smoke. Here's how to make sure you've got local copies of everything.

Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let's take a tour of some of our favourite services Google's killed off over the years.

Gmail is free, in part because Google has always scanned the contents of users' inboxes in order to serve targeted ads. It's a sleazy business model, but Google certainly isn't alone: Most other free email services (and, hi, social media platforms) do the same thing.

Unroll.me, the newsletter unsubscription service, was just busted selling off more data than most of us thought possible, so it goes without saying that many are dumping the service altogether. Good news though, a Google Script can unsubscribe you from a ton of emails almost just as easily.

Yesterday, The New York Times went deep into some of Uber's shady business practices. In the article, one small section revealed that one service we've talked about extensively over the years, Unroll.me, has been mining and selling off your email data, and Uber used that data to gain intelligence on Lyft.