The holiday season, for many, is more of a shopping season – and with lots of online shopping comes the need to track a lot of packages. Google, however, is making keeping track of all those packages a little easier, through an update to one of Gmail’s best features.
Credit: Google
The Gmail package-tracking feature was first launched in 2022, allowing users to tap on an email to get a summary of a package’s status, including when it was shipped and when it’s expected to arrive. For this holiday season, however, the feature is getting a bit of an update to make it even more useful. It’s easy to make use of too, though you will have to enable it.
Enabling it is pretty easy if you have a package on the way. All you have to do is open up an email related to a package, and tap the “Allow” button under the prompt notifying you that you can track your packages in Gmail.
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Alternatively, you can preemptively enable package tracking so that it’s on and ready to go when you start shopping. To do so, all you need to do is open the Gmail app on your phone, then tap on the three-line menu button on the top left-hand corner. Hit the “Settings” option, then look for “General Settings” on Android or “Data Privacy” on iOS, and find the “Package Tracking” option. Opt into it, and you should be good to go.
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After you do so, you’ll get cards at the top of your inbox telling you the status of any packages as those statuses change or delivery dates approach, and you’ll get expanded cards at the top of related emails – which will allow you to jump straight to tracking or details related to the package.
You only need to opt into package tracking once, and after you do so, Gmail will automatically track your packages – handy for those who buy a lot online.
Features like this are likely to get increasingly supercharged over the next few years, as AI becomes more integrated with our digital lives. It’s not hard to imagine a not-too-distant future when you’ll be able to ask Google’s Gemini for a summary of packages, only to have it surface these cards in the Gemini interface. In fact, it’s so not hard to imagine that I had to check that it didn’t already work (it doesn’t). You can, however, ask Gemini in the Gmail window to summarize any packages, and it’ll do its best to do so in text form. While it wasn’t quite perfect when I tried this, it got pretty close, surfacing information about packages that were recently delivered, and some that I’m expecting over the next few days.
Regardless, Gmail’s package tracking tool makes things a little more visual and a little more seamless.