Gone are the days of Hotmail and Yahoo dominating the e-mail sphere. While these platforms are still used, there is a new sheriff in town to rule the e-mail community: Gmail. Google’s popular e-mail service is so widely used because of everything users can do with it-send the standard e-mail message, chat in real-time with friends and manage calendars, just to name a few. Users are encouraged to take advantage of this awesome array of options, and here are some ways to do it.
Prioritize
When you visit your inbox and even send messages, you can star or put tabs next to particular messages. This is especially helpful when you need to remind yourself or the recipient of the importance of a message. Stars and tabs can be found to the left of the sender’s name within the inbox. Users may also sort the contents of their inboxes in various ways. At the top of the inbox there are a number of options, including “Important First” and “Unread First.” Using these sorting features changes the order in which messages appear. Filters are a great option as well.
Organize
Do you have a lot to get done? Check out the calendar feature to set dates and times for particular activities and tasks. It’s definitely helpful when there are too many things going on and you need help keeping track. If you have a project due on the 15th of next month and you need to complete a presentation to go along with it, you can enter that into the calendar. This will help you to budget your time accordingly. Users can even set reminders when deadlines are approaching. Either a pop-up or e-mail can remind you of impending deadlines minutes, hours, days or weeks ahead of go-time.
Merge
Do you have more than one e-mail account? If so, try merging or linking those accounts with your Gmail. This is handy when you’re exchanging messages with a variety of different people (i.e. work and family) because no matter which address is being used, all messages will come and go from your Gmail account. Jschmoe@hotmail.com and Josephschmoe@gmail.com can both have messages going in and out, you just need to specify which address is being used for each conversation, using the “Send Mail As” option.
Create
Are you using a computer that doesn’t have a good word processing application? No problem! Head over to your Gmail account and type up your project there as a Google Doc. Gmail hosts your written projects in its Google Drive which is specifically linked to your account. You can start a project and it will auto save for completion later. You can even share documents with other users by entering the names of your contacts. Depending on your preferences, these people can have viewing and/or editing privileges.
Search
While Gmail isn’t by any means full-scale e-discovery software you can search both within your inbox and outside of it via Google or Google Image search. It happens often that we get bogged down with too many messages and, no matter how organized we are, we can have trouble finding something important later. With Gmail, you can search your own inbox for messages containing specific keywords. For instance, if you were e-mailing your Grandma about her dog, Toby, at the top of your inbox, click the search bar and enter “Toby.” This should help in finding the conversation you had with Grandma.
Additionally, it’s possible to reference some information while composing a message. Gmail allows users to click the “Search” button at the top left of the screen to perform a quick search without having to enter the Google URL. The same goes for Google Images, which also has a link called “Images.”
Preview
Previews are available both for the contents of messages prior to opening them and for images attached to e-mails. If you want to see a preview of the message body, simply set your account to show a sample of the messages. This sample is a short snippet of the larger message, and it appears to the right of the primary subject line. Whether you want this option or not, settings for this feature may be accessed from the top right of the screen, by clicking the circular cog icon. Within the message itself, you can view attachments without opening the full file. A primary example of this is with attached images, which will appear smaller, but in a reasonable viewing size within the body of the message.
Chat
As mentioned earlier, Gmail enables users to talk to each other in real-time. Google brings the “instant messaging” concept to its e-mail platform without requiring users to install a secondary program onto the computer. With Gmail and Gchat, users can talk to each other directly from their e-mail accounts without extra space and memory being eaten up by additional programs. Consider also using the “old-school” chat room sort of format by inviting multiple contacts to participate in the same conversation. You’ll always know who’s available by looking to the bottom left of your page and looking for the green dot next to various contact names.
This only scratches the surface of all of the features within Gmail. However, to catalog them all would take all day. Start with the aforementioned tools and continue to learn and explore from there. Google has unleashed an unlimited world of possibilities, and the digital community loves it!
Tracey Bauer, Post from: SiteProNews
Using Features to Get the Most Out of Gmail
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