I woke up to Gmail colored labels today. Made me think my job was a game of Candy Land. I like them -- anything that helps convey the shape of my email heap in a glance is good. More colors would be good; Google is offering 24 presets. A side benefit to the popup interface for choosing a label color is the label renaming feature. No longer must you go into Edit Labels and hit rename. Google should bundle in the label delete feature, too.

As long as Gmail is adding value to the Inbox item line, I have two urgent wish-list features to propose:

1) Preview mouseover popup. We get a few words of the email in the Inbox, but not enough. Gmail is too clicky, and though it performs well, I spend way too much time waiting for emails to open. Then I often have to mark them as unread, when I'm postponing action on them. (My procrastination issues are a separate problem.)

2) Annotation. I want to put sticky notes all over my Inbox. Let me insert a note into the Inbox item, and let it expand into visibility when I mouse over a small annotation icon. Just like inserting a comment in Excel.

The goal is to make Gmail navigation as complete as possible without opening items. I don't want to click through to an actual email until I know I'm going to take action on it. Am I missing any preview or annotation plugins?