Starting with Thursday, U.S. and British users of the popular Gmail service will have the opportunity to test the new features that Google employees suggest to be integrated in the final version. To access the testing feature, users will have to click on the new tab labeled Labs.

The whole idea of the project is Google involving as many people as possible in the testing of the product, which the company hopes that will lead to a greater appeal to e-mail users. Up until now, the new features that had been added were first tested internally. Some of the company’s employees were allowed access to them, and then, if their feedback was ok, they would have been made public.

The new strategy, however, allows any Google engineer to add any feature that he or she likes, no matter how silly it would seem. The code would then have to pass a simple test to make sure that there aren’t any internal conflicts in the product that could lead to a system crash, and then the feature would be uploaded on the site.

After a period of time in which people would give their feedback about the new features, some of them will be integrated in the service, others not.

Some of the features that will be released in the first version of Gmail Labs are the Superstar feature, which allows users to mark received e-mail with custom stars, the Old Snake feature, which is a recreation of the Snake game, and the Mouse Gestures feature, which takes actions based on the users’ mouse movements.