I use GMail as my main email client. Often I’m at work and I see something online that I think is useful, and I want to remind myself of it. I have tried righting down URLS on scraps of paper in the past, but sending an email to myself works as a good reminder for me. As a bonus, I can pick up my GMail form anywhere, including my iPhone.

I’m a programmer, so I am lazy by nature. It’s kind of a pain to open a new browser, and navigate to GMail.com and then copy and paste the URL of the site, and text into GMail and then send it.

Enter the GmailThis! bookmarklet by Doug Ward. Bookmarklets are bits of javascript that you save as bookmarks in your browser. When you click that bookmark the javascript runs. Basically bookmarklets are little javascript plugins that work in almost any browser.

The GmailThis! bookmarklet will open up a new Gmail window in a little popup. The body will have the URL of the page you are currently on, and any text you happen to have highlighted at the moment. All you have to do is enter the recipients name.

You can get the GmailThis! bookmarklet from Doug Wards site, http://contrapants.org/blog/2005/07/gmailthis.html

Doug also made a cool video showing how simple the bookmarklet is to use.

If you are a heavy GMail user like I am, this is a must have.