Our part one article with the first set of seven things you didn’t know about Gmail really caught you off guard, but our top five are really going to get you by surprise! We have finally returned with our part two article to fill you in on everything you didn’t know about your favorite email base! To find out all these helpful hints, just keep reading!
Number Eight: Can Your Emails. As one of the better features offered in Gmail Labs, you now have the option to “can” your responses. Canned responses simply give you the option to save your response to a certain email for future use. This is quite helpful if you find yourself often typing out the same messages to multiple recipients. As you compose emails, the options bar at the bottom right will now allow you to save or use canned responses.
Number Seven: Get Read Receipts. We’ve all faced the struggles of ignored emails and eagerly awaiting particular replies, and now you can put your mind at ease. Though not many people know about this, you could be receiving read receipts to see when your emails have been opened. Many extensions offer services like this, including Bananatag Email Tracking, Sidekick, and Intelliverse Email Tracker.
Number Six: Make a To-Do List. It can be extremely tiresome to keep tabs on your digital life from multiple devices, which is why it can be helpful to create inbox to-do lists for every aspect of your life. Remember The Milk is a service that simply adds a to-do checklist to the right side of your email platform. You can make lists for your personal life, work, and even turn messages into tasks. If you’d like, you can even import these lists to your calendar and contacts. For even more helpful features for to-do lists, try Todoist for Gmail.
Number Five: Keep Track of Your Calendar. To further consolidate your electronic life, the services also offers a handy little calendar. You can manually enter all your important dates and reminders you might normally have on your phone or on paper, and Gmail will remind you of your plans. Why have your schedules and daily actions spread across multiple locations, when you could put it all in the same place?
Number Four: Connect Your Accounts. Google’s email service is especially helpful in organizing multiple email accounts. They make it possible to connect each of your email accounts, making it simple to have separate accounts for work, personal, shopping, etc. There is also a way to alter your settings to see new emails from all, or some, of these accounts simultaneously.
Number Three: Get Reminded with a Text. There are many programs available that offer to notify you at your discretion. AlwaysFind is one of the top options, although this service requires a fee; there are free substitutes with the same features. All you have to do is denote important emails, say, from a specific sender, and the program will text you when your inbox receives an email from this person.
Number Two: Search Apps. This feature is most useful for users who take advantage of other Gmail apps, such as Google Docs or Google Sites. Using these apps can be extremely helpful in consolidating your digital life, but are often timely to get to. To simplify the process, a feature called “Apps Search” is available in the Labs. From just altering a few settings in this feature, you could include app results (or any Google feature) in every search you make in your inbox.
Number One: Just Archive It. Possibly the most obnoxious and inevitable aspect of email is an inbox full of read emails that one day require too much effort to go through and clean. I mean, you could always just delete it after reading, but if you need to check back on it later it is already dead and gone. If you just lead it, it just exasperates the issue of a cluttered inbox. So how do you get around this? Just archive it. It is possible to alter the settings in Gmail so that a read message just goes straight to the archives. Simply go to General Settings, and scroll down to “Send & Archive”; mark the option for the button to appear, and you can easily send a message to the archives after you have read it. Hope you enjoyed our list about the top 15 things you didn’t know about Gmail!