Gmail to make email responding more like texting

Emojis have become an essential component of our daily conversations thanks to social media and text messaging. Emoji reactions make it simple to communicate feelings in response to communication without having to write out a full answer. Emoji replies were previously exclusive to the finest messaging applications, but they might soon be in your emails as well.

Steve Moser of The Tape Drive discovered code in the iOS Gmail client two weeks ago that hinted Google would include emoji reactions. The owner of the Gapps Flags & Leaks Telegram channel, AssembleDebug, has just posted further proof of this assertion on The SP Android.

That last string suggests that this feature won’t be available to all users at once. It will likely undergo some sort of beta testing before it is available to the public, and the “user” phrasing suggests an account-based change.

There were also a handful of restrictions that AssembleDebug found listed in the code. These seem to be tooltips Gmail will throw in situations where emoji reactions aren’t supported:

• You received this via BCC, so you can’t react with an emoji
• You can’t react with an emoji to this encrypted message
• You can’t respond with an emoji to a large group
• You can’t react with an emoji more than (number) times
• You cannot add more than 20 emoji reactions to a message
• This message has hit the limit of 50 unique reactions

These limitations seem to apply to the desktop website as well as Android and iOS, with some perhaps being applicable to both. It’s unclear how it will operate, but if its implementation is anything like that of most messengers, you will be able to right-click or long-press an email to select one of a few common reactions and then possibly open an overflow menu to choose from the entire list of emoji. Your guess is as good as ours as to how Gmail might inform the sender of your response at this time.