Sunday Tips, Part 7: Gmail

I use Gmail constantly. I have something like 11 email addresses, all of which feed into Gmail. Gmail manages my tasks, my email, my calendar, etc. etc.

I suspect I’m not the only one who has what I like to call "Gmailophilia." Because of that, I’ll share a few tips that make using, navigating and understanding Gmail a bit easier.

1. Keyboard Scrolling As in many other Google apps, use the J button to scroll down through emails, and K to go up. Enter opens the email you’ve scrolled to, and X selects the email so you can do any number of other things.

2. [ and ] Sometimes you’ll get a whole bunch of email that you have to go through at once. Instead of dealing with every email, going back to the Inbox, and starting over, take the easy way. The ] key (next to the P) archives the current message and goes to the next, and [ archives the message and goes to the previous. For dealing with a stream of unread email, this one’s key.

3.  Bring a Label to the Top Gmail organizes your Labels (like folders, only better) in alphabetical order. This can be a pain- maybe "Reply" is your most used Label, but you have to scroll down to find it! Instead, put a "!" or  "@" symbol at the front (i.e. @Reply) to bring it to the top of the list.

4.  Dot Filters Gmail recognizes yourname@gmail.com as different from you.rname@gmail.com, which is different from y.ourname@gmail.com. Using these, you can create filters to send certain emails to a particular place. For instance- if you want business emails to go to one place and personal to another, give yourn.ame@gmail.com to one, and yo.urname@gmail.com to another. They’ll look different to Gmail, and are easy to filter.

5. Emailing other Gmailers If you’re emailing someone with a Gmail account, there’s no need to type their whole email address. Just type their screen name (the part before the @ symbol), and Gmail will send it to the right place. It’s a huge timesaver, especially given that more and more people are using Gmail.

6. Forward, One and All If you’ve got a conversation that you want to send to someone, but only want to send them one message from the conversation, go to the bottom of that message and select "Forward." If you want to forward the whole conversation, look to the right of the messages (between the message and the sidebar) and select "Forward All." Whether you want to forward one message or all of them, Gmail’s got you covered.

7. Attachment Hunting In the Google search bar, search "has:attachments" without the quotation marks. That will bring up all the messages with attachments. To find only attachments from Bill, search "from:Bill has:attachment" to narrow the list even further. It’s an easy way to see all the files in Gmail. Though, if you remember the filename, searching for "filename: in the Gmail search will bring it up for you.

8. Compound Searching Your search can be as detailed as you’d like. Search any combination of things- Sender, time, Label, Chat, to name a few- any number of things. For a full list of the search operators, check out Google’s list.

9. POP and IMAP You can use Gmail easily with any other application, and Gmail’s made the whole process easy. In the "Settings" pane, make sure IMAP and POP are both enabled. Then, check out Gmail’s IMAP and POP configuration pages.

10. Bookmark a Single Email Every Gmail message has a dedicated URL. That way, you can bookmark a single email, because every one has its own URL. No need to copy down or print the information in an email- just bookmark it and refer to it as you need to.

Gmail’s easy to use and powerful right out of the box, but it takes a bit of understanding and know-how to really be a power user.

How do you pimp your email?

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