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The Gmail inbox is set up fairly straightforwardly. Your messages appear in the main larger column and a smaller navigation sidebar is on the left-hand side. The most important buttons are probably the Compose button, at the top of the left-hand sidebar, and the Settings button, at the top right-hand corner of the page.
- The compose button allows you to create messages to other people. Clicking it will bring up a new message in the right corner of your screen. Gmail automatically saves any work that you do so if you accidently close the new message it will be saved in your drafts folder. If you want to delete the message without sending it there is a small trash can icon in the bottom right corner of the new message that will discard the message without saving it (it will also delete the draft if you reopened it from there).
- The settings icon holds a variety of quick settings that are useful to be able to access quickly. A full list of settings can be found within the drop down menu and completely changes the screen when you click it.
Categories
By default you , your inbox is comprised of four categories that are displayed as tabs at the top of your inbox:
- Primary, where all of your personal emails should go (Gmail is pretty good about this, sometimes one will slip through the cracks though).
- Social, where all mail from social networking, media-sharing sites, dating services, and other social sites go.
- Promotions, where mail from companies with deals, offers, and other marketing mail goes.
- Updates, where confirmations, receipts, statements, and other notifications go.
- Forums, is the fifth tab and is where where mail that isn't addressed specifically to you, but to a list or group will go.
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Changing your default text style can be done here so if you don't like the default mail style and change yours you can change it here once and not have to worry about changing it for every message. Conversation View changes the way messages are grouped together. By default, Conversation View is on, which means that messages with the same subject are grouped together in one thread. If this feature is turned off messages will show up individually. A useful feature is Undo Send which will delay the actual sending of your messages by the amount of time specified. This allows you to "undo" the sending of your messages. This is a particularly useful feature in case you forget to attach a file (although Gmail will usually remind you if you reference an attachment in the body of an email and there is nothing attached) or make some other mistake that you remember after you've already hit the send button.
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Personal level indicators are a good way to quickly find messages that are addressed directly to you and not to a mailing list. This feature is slightly less useful if you use the forums category since messages sent to mailing lists are aggregated under that category anyway, but they are still useful in seeing messages that are sent to a group of people versus only you. Snippets will control if the content of an email will be displayed in the mailbox or only the subject line. When turned on the beginning of the message, as much as will fit on one line, will be displayed in the mailbox after the subject of the email.
Finally, in the general tab, you can set your vacation responder which will auto respond to any message received with a message of your choosing for either a set period of time or an indefinite amount of time. For more information of on the vacation responder see , see below.
Archive
Archiving emails is a great way to free your inbox of clutter while keeping all of your emails around for reference. Archiving emails allows you to remove the emails from your inbox so when you open your email your inbox looks clean, while still having access to older emails.
Using labels with archive the archive is a good way to organize your emails and make it easy to find emails in a pinch. Even if you don't use labels the search feature in Gmail is very robust and it is a good idea to keep emails around. Especially since emails are very small data size wise and you get a lot of storage for free with Gmail. You can access your archived emails by clicking the All Mail button under More on the sidebar. Archived emails will also show up when looking at all the emails under a label.
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Your contacts are the people that you send emails to. There are many fields in a contact card but not all of them need to be filled if they aren't relevant. Your contacts sync with your Google account so if you add your account to another device such as a smartphone or tablet then all of your contacts attached to your Gmail will be in on your phone. This is useful for aggregating all your contacts and their info in one place.
To access your contacts click on Mail At the very top of the left sidebar and select Contacts from the drop-down menu. You can also view your contacts in the contacts app by clicking on the apps menu (the square of nine smaller squares in the top right corner and selecting Contacts from the menu.
On your school Gmail accounts there are many different pages for your contacts. Your My Contacts section are contacts that you have added manually yourself; most contacted are the poeple people you message most frequently; other contacts are people that you have sent emails to, these are the addresses that Gmail will autocomplete for you when you send emails to them again; and the directory are is the people in your district. You can create other groups to further organize your contacts so you can find people easily, just click New Group.
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Filters are a way to automatically perform a variety of actions to incoming (or already received mail). The most common use of filters is to automatically apply a label to certain mail for more information on filters and labels see here. The easiest way to create a filter is to save a search as a filter. Simply search for a certain criteria of mail such as all mail from a specific person or to a specific list and then click Create a filter with this search at the bottom right corner of the search popup. From there you can select the actions that you wish the filter to perform such as archiving, adding a label, or marking the message as read.
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To set up forwarding all mail go to the Settings and then the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. You can set it to forward all mail to a certain email address and either, : keep the mail, leaving it unread; keep the mail in the inbox, marking it as read; archive the mail; or delete the mail.
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In Gmail labels work similar to folders with one huge advantage: you can apply more than one label to an email. Labels make it very easy to organize and sort through your inbox at a glance. You can make it even easier by assigning specific colors to labels of your choosing and really helping them stand out. Once you've created a label you can find all the messages with that label via search, or by clicking on the label in the left-hand bar in Gmail. You can easily create, edit, and delete existing labels. Labels can be nested too and applied automatically with the use of filters. Using labels is the best way to efficiently organize your inbox and reduce clutter. For a more in-depth discussion on the creating and editing of labels see here.
Labs
Google labs Labs are additional features that developers have created that are not included in the official Gmail app. There are some useful features in google labs but all of the things in labs are experimental and as the disclaimer at the top of the labs page says they may change, break, or disappear at any time without warning. To enable labs go to the Settings page and click on the Labs tab. Browse the labs until you find one you think is useful and that you'd like and click Enable. Then you'll need to click Save Changes at the top for the labs to take effect.
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Google also has a feature that will use POP3 to receive mail from up to 5 other email accounts. To enable it go to Accounts tab and locate the Get mail from other accounts section. Click Add a mail account you own and enter the email address. Enter the required information about the account and then click Add account. Since this uses POP3 when you check your inbox from the native address all of your mail will still be there unread, unsorted, and un-deleted/archived.
Signature
In Gmail, you can set a signature that will appear at the bottom of all your outgoing emails. This can be found in on the Settings page, under General settings. You can set your signature to anything you wish but typically it consists of your name, contact information, and information about your title.
By default, your signature will appear at the very bottom of the email, even when forwarding or replying to mail with quoted text. You can change this so your email always appears at the end of whatever you type as a message by checking the box under the text box in the settings that says "Insert this signature before quoted text in replies and remove the "--" line that precedes it." This will, as it implies also remove the "--" that typically separates your signature from the body of your message. If you are particularly attached to this separator you can just add it to your signature.
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Stars in Gmail are a useful way to mark differentiate more important mail from less important mail. You can star messages and they will appear in your Primary inbox no matter what they are usually categorized as. You can find all your starred mail in the Starred label in the left sidebar. To star a message click on the star next to the message. You can also star archived mail in order to find it easily even if you don't need it in you inbox anymore. You can enable a variety of different stars in on the Settings page under the General tab. To switch the type of star simply keep clicking on the star icon next to the message. The stars will rotate through in the order that they are displayed on the settings page. To unstar un-star a message, just click the star until the star field is blank again.
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Tasks are an easy way to make checklists. You can access the tasks popup by clicking Mail at the top of the sidebar and selecting Tasks from the dropdown drop-down menu. To create a task simply click the plus at the bottom of the tasks popuppop-up. To mark the task as complete check the box next to the task. The task will become crossed out, but it will not be deleted until the trash can icon at the bottom of the popup is clicked.
You can create many lists of different tasks. To change lists or create new lists click on the rightmost buton button on the bottom of the tasks popuppop-up. You can add information to a tasak task such as a due date by clicking on the sideways arrow, >, next to the task when you mouse over it.
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When you delete messages in Gmail they aren't automatically deleted. They are actually moved to a separate folder called the Trash. This folder can be accessed from the sidebar under More. Messages that are in the trash for more than 30 days are automatically deleted. This system can save you if you accidently delete a message. You can, of course, undo the deletion immediately by clicking undo in the notification that pops up, but if you miss that, and the 30 day limit hasn't been reached, you can move the message back to your inbox by opening the message from the trash (or by searching for it), and deleting the trash label by clicking the small x next to the label name next to the subject of the email.
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If you are going to be away for a period of time and not checking email it is often a good idea to set up a vacation reminder to let people know that you are on vacation. When people send someone sends you email, the vacation responder will automatically reply to that email with a predetermined message that you enter. You can put whatever you want in a vacation responder. Usually, they consist of a statement saying you're away and won't be checking email and list a date when you will be returning.
You can reach the vacation responder in on the Settings page under General. You can set a vacation responder to start at a specified date and either leave an end date when it will stop automatically responding or just let it keep going until you turn it off.
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