You email a friend who is halfway around the world. You check your other emails. By the time you are done, you have a reply from your friend. You write to him again, and bam! Another reply. You wish you could chat with him right then. Now you can do it with Gmail: Google now offers Gmail users the ability to chat with their contacts.

The service is being rolled out to Gmail users in stages and this has been going on for about three days now. The next time you sign into your Gmail account, don't be surprised to see a screen that asks you whether you want to save your chats in your gmail account or not. Yes, the integrated chat offers automatic saving of chat conversations in your mailbox. No more banging your head against the display when you closed the last conversation without saving.

Nothing to download

One of the best things about the service is that there is nothing to download and install and no new application windows to open. Say you are travelling and the café or hotel computer doesn't have a chat application installed, no sweat, sign into your gmail account and chat with your contacts.

Chatting is easy: you have a quick contacts box on the left side of the screen after you sign in to your email account. A green light next to the contact means (s)he is online. Just move your mouse pointer over the contact and you will get an option to chat or email if the contact is also signed in. If the contact is not signed in, you will get an option to send an email.

Once you choose to chat with a contact, a small window opens on the right bottom corner of your screen. You can start by typing in "hi!" or "Boo!" in the message box, depending on your mood, and press enter to send your first message. If you are uncomfortable working in the small box at such an inconvenient location on the screen just press the "Pop-out" button on the right bottom of the chat box and you will get a window which you can resize and move anywhere on the screen.

You can have an off-the-record conversation, but that only means that gmail will not save the conversation. You can do this by clicking on options in the left-bottom of the chat box and choosing "Go off the record." If you want to go back on the record — meaning that this part of the chat session will be saved — you just click on options and choose to stop chatting off the record. Please remember that this setting applies to the contact and not to the specific chat session, so if you have a secret conversation one day and want to record the next conversation, you have to specifically choose to stop chatting off the record with that contact.

Anyway, if your contact is devious enough, (s)he can cut and paste the text in the message box into a text file and blackmail you for eternity. Importantly, the system lets both people know when the conversation is off-the-record and when it is not. It doesn't indicate this in the saved transcript, though.

Multiple sessions

Multiple sessions with the same contact over one day are stored as one chat conversation, with the time clearly marked in the transcript.

Perhaps the best feature of the new service is that all the conversation transcripts are searchable, so you can always get those elusive email addresses or phone numbers from your chat sessions.

Your contacts don't have to be gmail users for you to use gmail chat, it is enough if they use Google Talk.

Just send an invite and if they do not have Gmail or Google Talk, they will be asked to sign up for either service. Like most chat programs, you can set your status — available, busy, etc — and also block some contacts from seeing you or chatting with you online.

If you were going to ask how this is different from Google Talk, just one word — voice. Gmail chat doesn't offer voice chat.

At present the Gmail chat service is available only in Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 1.0 and above.

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