In a spree of location awareness, Google developed a new tool that lets Gmail automatically include your location in an e-mail’s signature. Why did I said “spree of location awareness”, well off course it’s just a week after Google’s launch of Latitude; a service that automatically shares your location with selected friends who might want to know where you are. In fact the various enhancements to mail have been arriving at a lightning speed– Sync for mobiles, Multiple Inboxes, Offline Gmail and Tasks etc. fascinating stuffs recently.

This location aware signature feature can be switched on by going to the Labs tab in Gmail settings. Users also need to have their email signature enabled and have the "append your location to the signature" option clicked in the general settings tab.

Basically it works by checking your public IP address to estimate the location, so it’s not exactly accurate. But if Google Gears’ location module it will use Wi-Fi triangulation to get more accurate results. After the feature turned on Gmail automatically adds the user’s location, without any room to edit/modify it. So careful if you have that turned on and lying to your Wife or Girlfriend J well off course one way to do it is delete the whole portion. So this experimental Gmail Labs feature will detect your location and appends the city region and country names to your signature, which will look like this (screen shot taken from Gmail blog ):

Ok so it’s all good that Google has come so far with LBS technology and honour its users to be part of this endeavour. But the privacy guys do not like it since the “Latitude” launch. Lots of expert said “Google Latitude could be a "gift" to stalkers, prying employers and jealous partners”. Looks like Google just gave them another tool to discuss with.