Google added to Gmail a feature that solves one of the smallest but most recurring annoyances in digital security: copying a six-digit code from your inbox by hand. The news is called “Copy code” and appears as a pill-shaped button, positioned immediately under the subject of verification emails, in the same space that Gmail normally reserves for attachment previews.
The mechanism eliminates several manual steps. Until now, to recover a code received via email you had to open the message, select the sequence of digits (often with micro movements of the cursor to avoid including other text) and only then copy it. With the new button, all it takes is a tap directly from the inbox list: the code ends up on the clipboard, ready to be pasted into the app or site that requests it.
The function was first identified by 9To5Mac, which confirmed its functioning on its devices. The rollout is linked on the server side to the most recent versions of the app: 2026.09.07.x on Android and 6.0.260907 on iOS. At the moment, the button has not yet appeared on the web version of Gmail.
A function already seen elsewhere, but missing on Gmail
The concept is not entirely new: several messaging apps have long offered a similar button under the message containing the code, designed specifically to avoid manual copying. On Gmail, however, it was missingalthough email remains one of the most used channels for receiving access confirmations from online shops, banks and digital services of various kinds.
The button appears to work with emails from heterogeneous senders, not just Google’s standardized formats. It remains to be seen how reliable code recognition is when the email text deviates from the most common patterns, a detail that the limited rollout does not yet allow to verify on a large scale.
The news comes close to other recent changes to Gmail, including the “Live” voice functions for search and chat, also extended to Docs and Keep, and the wider dissemination of replies generated by Gemini within the inbox for paid users. In short, Google is continuing to refine the experience of using the mail app with small targeted interventions, rather than with large-scale ads.
With the new implementation, the time saving is objectively marginal, we are talking about a few seconds per operation. But it is precisely in the sum of these details that the care of a product used by hundreds of millions of people every day is measured.
