8+ Tips to Beef Up GMail: "
I remember when I started using GMail. It was a warm day in April 2004. I couldn’t believe I got an invite, and all because I was using Blogger for my blog at the time. I knew when I first opened it up in my browser that this would be a web app I’d use for a long time. Over the years it has grow, in my opinion, only stronger and I still use it to this day, every day. I have also accumulated over the 7 years of use, a list of tips to make your GMail experience even better- more productive, easier, and even cleaner. Here are some of my favorites.
New Theme: Preview
I want to open with GMail’s newest addition: the Preview theme. This is a theme that mimic’s Google+ and Google Calendar’s redesign, and I’ve got to say it’s super clean.
Preview (From the GMail Blog)
There is also “Preview Dense,” which removes some extra padding as it was designed for lower screen resolutions.
The People Widget
GMail’s People widget (enabled by default I believe) is a slick little way to get a quick overview of the contact info for whomever’s email you’re viewing.
People widget (From the GMail Blog)
If you have the extension that puts Google Chat on the right side, you will not see this widget.
Rapportive
Do you like the People widget, but want a little more bang for your buck? If you’re a Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Mailplane, you’re in luck! The Rapportive add-on for these apps adds a right sidebar much like the People widget to each conversation in GMail, but there is a lot more information.
Rapportive
Boomerang
Boomerang is a plugin I feel I could probably do an entire review on. This awesome little app allows you to manage your inbox by scheduling emails you send or want returned to your inbox at a later date.
Boomerang
The second feature is for scheduling emails to send at a specific time. You write up the email or response, save it, and schedule it by pressing the “Send Later” button. This is good if, for example, you like to send your follow up emails at the same time every week. Write the email while you’re thinking about it, and schedule it to be sent.
I’m sure you could think up some other reasons to respond to an email but not send it until later as well
One Inbox for All of Your Email Addresses
(Sidebar: I was going to name this section, “One Inbox to Rule Them All.”)I have a ton of email addresses. One for each of my important domains, a personal one, one for the university I teach at, and a few more I don’t use. Thanks to GMail, I don’t have to run all over the Internet to check my many mailboxes.
There are two things you can do to make GMail your one-stop shop for all of your email:
First, forward all of your email to one address (you do this from each individual address inbox). Similarly, you can use GMail to check the other inboxes that support POP3. You do that by going to Settings->Accounts and Import and pressing the “Add POP3 email Account” button.
Add POP3 Email
- Under Accounts and Import, find and press the “Send mail from another address” button
- Put in the email address you want to send from
- Select if you want to use the SMTP settings for that domain (I usually don’t, though it’s recommended for professional domains).
- Get and input the verification code
Once you set up a new email address to send from, you can make it the default one for your GMail account. You can also choose to automatically reply using whatever email address that email was sent to.
The "Send mail as" Area
Use the “+” Sign to Create Multiple Addresses
Ever want to sign up for a new service but were hesitant to use your primary address? GMail offers an interesting feature so that you don’t have to worry about that. Just add a + sign and any word after your username, but before the @ and it’s like you have a whole other email address (ex: joec+newsite@gmail.com). Then, set up a filter with that address in the “To” field and filter it however you’d like.An example is how I use this for newsletter subscriptions. So they aren’t cluttering up my inbox, I sign up for newsletters with jcasabona+subscriptions@gmail.com. I have a filter set up so that anything that goes to that address skips my inbox and goes to a label called “Subscriptions.” Then I can read all the newsletters when I have some time!
Forgot Attachment and Undo Send
We’ve all done it, and we’ve all felt stupid after: prematurely sending an email and forgetting an attachment are two things that happen all the time. Luckily, the fine people at Google know this and have created two lab features to help us prevent these little email faux pas.The first is Forgot Attachment. I actually just read that this lab feature graduated into a regular GMail features, so you shouldn’t have to do anything to enable it. GMail will scan your email for forms of the word ‘attachment’ and then check to see that you have actually attached something. If you didn’t, a little alert box will pop-up asking you if you forgot to attach something. This has saved me countless follow-up emails.
Forgot Attachement
Undo Send
Default Reply to All and Send & Archive
These two lab features are designed to remove a couple of clicks from your overall inbox experience. The are Default Reply to All and Send & Archive.As you probably know, if you want to Reply to everyone in an email, you need to specifically click “Reply to All.” Default Reply to All makes it so when you press the “Reply” button, you are automatically replaying to everyone in the ‘To’ and ‘CC’ fields. If you don’t want to Reply to All, simply press the “Reply” button again.
The “Send & Archive” button is one I absolutely love. It used to be the case that I’d reply to an email, let it send, then press the archive button to get it out of my inbox. With the Send & Archive feature, the email is sent and then the conversation is automatically archived. Words cannot describe how much I love this.
Both of these features can be enabled through Settings->Lab.
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