Gmail+Tips


 * Gmail Tips **

Several of you probably know that Gmail is one of the most talked about e-mail services around today. This article will help you understand Gmail a little bit more by showing you five neat tricks you can do with it!


 * 1.) How to use labels? **

In real life, we always like to label people, don’t we? Then, why spare our e-mail! Let us say you get an e-mail twice a week from one of the groups you are involved in and you would like nothing more than to have them all listed together, so you could view them whenever you wanted. Well, that's no problem.

First, we need to create a label. Name it whatever your group's name is. (For this example, Rugby Club).

Go to ** Settings **, ** Label **.

Or, in the left panel, click on Edit Labels.



Enter the name of the label here and press ** Create **. After the label is created, go to the next link, which says ** Filters **.



Click on ** Create a new filter **. In the fields that open up, enter the e-mail ID (for example, group@bb.com) of the sender in the “From” field. Then, click on ** Next **.



Now, check on the box which says ** Apply Label ** and from the drop down menu, select the label which you would like to put on all e-mails coming from this particular address. Finally, click ** Create Filter **.



Now, all messages that come from group@bb.com will automatically be labelled Rugby Club. You can then create labels for all your e-mails coming from a specific e-mail address (other groups you're in, friends, family, etc.) and then list them by clicking on the corresponding label in the left panel.


 * 2.) **

Gmail supports the standard "plus" addressing scheme. The plus addressing scheme lets you add additional words to your account name. The “plus” word acts as a keyword, which helps you in organizing your e-mail messages efficiently.

Let us assume that you are a creative genius or a quotes collector and you would like to archive your creative ideas/quotes in one place.

You have your Gmail account (for example, genius@Gmail.com) and you create a new label. You can name it "Ideas" or "Quotes" or whatever you want. Now, every time you have that great idea or find a wonderful quote, just e-mail it to your Gmail account in the following format:

Username+labelname@Gmail.com

For instance, If your username is genius@Gmail.com and the label that you created is named “Ideas,” the format you would use would be: genius+ideas@Gmail.com. All of the e-mails to this address would automatically get labelled “Ideas.”

Similarly, you could use labels to categorize e-mails under different categories. For example, Username+shoppinglist@Gmail.com (for your wife's grocery list), Username+office@Gmail.com (for your office correspondence) and Username+amazon@Gmail.com (for your amazon.com account). The possibilities are endless, depending on how many e-mails you get each day from the same addresses.

In case you are still a little confused, your username is your Gmail User ID, which you receive when you first sign up for your Gmail account.


 * 3.) You can save your files on Gmail **

Let us say you have vacation pictures you want to share with your friends or you are working on a project with other people who are located in another part of the country. Or, maybe you just want a backup of your files online. Gmail lets you accomplish all of these things. Gmail provides you with 2 GB of space and what is even better is that this space can be used as an Internet hard drive. All you need to do is download theGmail Driveplugin. :- []

This plugin is necessary for the integration of the Gmail space with your Window 's Explorer. The Gmail drive acts just like any other hard drive you have on your computer. It lets you save and retrieve files directly from your Explorer. You can drag and drop files, create new folders and copy files just like you can in your other programs.

Once you get that downloaded, just run the setup and you’re done with that.

Now, open your browser and click on the Gmail drive. It will prompt you to enter you Gmail username and password. Enter the information and bingo, you are active.



Every time a new file is copied or created in the Gmail drive, an e-mail is generated and posted to your account. That e-mail contains the particular file as an attachment. The Gmail drive also regularly checks your Gmail account to see if any new files have arrived.

Who needs Cloud?


 * 4.) **


 * Here are some of the most used keyboard shortcuts? **

Any action that you can take in Gmail using the mouse can be done with the keyboard too. It just makes doing things a lot more faster.

First of all, we need to enable the keyboard shortcuts. To do that, go to ** Settings **.

Under the ** General tab **, you will see the option to enable/disable keyboard shortcuts.



A few of the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts are:


 * C ** = Compose


 * R ** = Reply


 * A ** = Reply All


 * F ** = Forward


 * P ** = Previous


 * N ** = Next


 * O ** = Enter, Open/Expand/Collapse a conversation


 * X ** = Select conversations


 * S ** = Start the conversation


 * Y ** = Archives the e-mail.


 * U ** = Returns to Inbox


 * ! ** = Reports conversation as spam


 * / ** = Goes to the search box