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Google Gmail

Add More Emoji (Emoticons) Such as Sports, Fruit, Flags, and Music

SUMMARY: If you like Gmail's emoticons but wish you had a bunch more to choose from, a Labs feature gives you plenty more to play with.

This feature has been around for a while but not everyone knows about it. While Google's Gmail lets you insert emoticons such as smiling faces into your e-mail, by default you're only given a couple of tabs of icons. What if you could have over a dozen tabs of emoticons available, allowing you to insert icons of everything from sports to fruit to flags to music?

A Gmail Labs feature offers these extra sets of emoticons, and it's easy to turn it on:

1. Click the "Settings" link near the top-right of Gmail.

2. When the "Settings" page appears, click the "Labs" tab.

3. Next to "Extra Emoji", click the "Enable" radio button.

Enabling extra emoji (emoticons) in Google Gmail

4. Click the "Save Changes" button.

Now when you compose a message and click the "Insert Emoticon" button, many more icons will be at your disposal.

More emoticons are available when enabling the "Extra Emoji" Gmail Labs feature

This tip refers to a Gmail Labs feature that is subject to change or be removed completely without notice. In rare instances Labs features may even break Gmail, so they offer the following link as an "escape hatch": https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0