Gmail Tips And Tricks (Layout Overview)

Gmail The better free email system

This post explains how the layout of Gmail looks and description about each fields

Click and open the image in a new tab or window, so you can follow what I am explaining here

General Navigation to other Gmail Services

• You can use 1 Gmail ID to browse all the Google services
• Inside Gmail you will find links to other services like Calender, Documents, Photos, Reader, Web and More
• Under more, you have Youtube, Images, Sites, Maps, News, Shopping, Video, Groups, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogs and even more…
• The best part of this navigation link is, when you access something very often from your account that will come on top from the more menu. For example, if you are accessing Books very often, the Books menu will appear as a button instead of hiding under more menu

Your Email ID, Settings, Help, Version, Signout

• You will see your email Id in Black color
• Next to that you have settings button to set your preference and account settings like changing password
• Help menu will guide you in every step with FAQs, sometimes it is helpful , some times it is not
• Many people never knew how to sign out of Google services. It is the corner button on Right TOP
• If you have slower internet connection, you can choose the older version to load the pages faster

Search Email or the Web

• If you have thousands of emails and is you want to find the message, just type the term that you remember about that email, anything like name of the sender, email id, subject or content
• You can also refine your search by doing the advanced search
• If you want to get some information from the web, you can search the web from your Gmail
• You cannot search inside an attached document like Yahoo email

Filters

• Filters are one of the reasons why Gmail beats most of the other free email providers
• You can set the filter based on many parameters
• There are still more feature needed, if you ask me 🙂
• You can set filters based on the sender and you can send the email directly to a folder or assign a label
• You can forward certain emails to anyone using filters
• I have not seen any limitation with number of filters
• Filters works best in Gmail

Compose new Email

• Create new email with Gmail by clicking on the “Compose” button
• It is very easy to create a new email with Gmail
• The compose box looks like below

• You just need to type the recipient email ID and type the content and click the send button
• This is one of other best interface you can get in Gmail than any other free email services
• You can compose a message and save it for sending it later
• The saved messages will be in Drafts folder
• The message is auto saved during certain intervals

Select Messages

• You can select messages using the types
• Click All to select all the message
• Click “None” to unselect anything that is selected previously
• Click Unread to select only the unread messages in the page
• Click Starred to select only the Starred message in the page
• Click Unstarred to select only the unstarred message in the page
• Remember all these are applicable only to the current page
• If you want to select all the pages, you will have to do a advanced search
• There is one more method of searching the messages type
• Type “is:unread” in the search box to find out unread messages
• Type is:Starred in the search box to find out starred messages
• Type is:read in the search box to find all the read messages

More actions

• This drop down menu helps you to do more things that are not visible
• This icon is displayed out side and also inside the message window

• These is the complete list of the “more action” menu
• Select any message and click on the “More action” and select which actio you want Gmail to do
• You can mark any messages as Read
• You can mark any meaages as Unread
• you can Add a star to any message
• You can Remove Star
• You can create Event in Google calander
• Filter any messages by choosing “Filter Messages Like these” (you will get filter option)
• Create a new Label
• Mark Infected item
• Mark as Junk or spam email

Next Page

• If you have more emails, you may not find all the messages in 1 page
• To go to the next page click Older button
• If you want to go to the last page, click Oldest
• Once you are in the next page you will see “New” and “Newest” button
• Click “New” to go to the previous page
• Click “Newest” to go to the 1st page

Default Folders

• Gmail comes with set of default folders that cannot be altered by anyone
• There is no other way to create a folder for yourself
• You can set the labels and treat the labels as a folder, it is pretty much the same
• “Inbox” holds all the new emails that comes to you email ID
• “Starred” holds all the messages that you have marked with star
• “Chats” holds all the chat history from you ID
• “Sent mail” holds all the sent mail from your ID
• “Drafts” holds all the drafts saved by you, when you send the message, it will not be there in “Drafts” any more
• “All mail” holds all email including draft and sent item
• “Spam” holds all the junk email or crap email that you have set as spam
• “Trash” holds all the emails that was deleted earlier
• “Archive” this button appears on top of all the message, you can use this to retrieve the old message

Contacts

• Click on the “Contacts” button to browse and edit and delete the contacts that you have

Labels

• Labels acts as a folder also
• Labels are to classify the messages according to your will you can create any number of labels
• You can also color your label from this menu
• You can delete the Labels
• You can click on any label to filter the messages with the label you clicked
• Labels are one of the best options Gmail have over the other providers

Chat Window

• Gmail offers a feature where you can chat from Gmail
• You do not need to install any software
• Just Login to Gmail and start using this
• This window displays the contacts that you have and their online status, you can select the contact and start chatting
• All the chat history will be saved in the “Chat” folder
• You can set your online status also

List of messages

• Gmail separates read and unread messages by color
• Unread messages subject lines are Bold and white back ground
• Read messages subject lines are normal with light bluish back ground
• When you click on the left side of the subject line where there is an empty star mark, it will turn in to golden Star mark and this message is known as starred message

So this is just the overview of Gmail, thee is more to Gmail than this.

You will find more post in the website about Gmail tips and Tricks and to increase productivity.

If you have any question or suggestions please post a comment

Dave 🙂