Gmail, while one of the more ubiquitous and popular email apps, has been rather light weight in terms of the formatting it supports. Recently, Google has started rolling out an oft-requested and helpful feature allowing some special entities like email IDs, addresses and contact numbers to be recognized and formatted as clickable hyperlinks.

The links upon being clicked should open with their respective apps. Thus for instance, clicking on an address opens it in Google Maps, clicking on an email link composes a new blank message with the email ID as the sender and clicking on a phone number opens up the relevant calling app which could be particularly useful on mobile phones.

Users should have begun seeing the update as Google began the roll-out last week, estimating 1-3 days for it to complete. Google said on a blog post about this release: “Gmail users often exchange information like addresses and phone numbers with each other to set up meetings, introduce colleagues, and plan events. Precious time can be lost by having to copy and paste this information from an email into other apps and websites, so we wanted to provide a better way to perform these tasks that also saves time”. While a small change, this will undoubtedly be welcome by a majority of users out there.