Do you know your Gmail?

Gmail changed the way one used to perceive web-based mail service. With its abundant services and cool features it took the world by storm and became a model for others to emulate. The degree of customization combined with the ease of use it offers is remarkable. How many of us then use Gmail for any other purpose than just read and browse our emails?

In this post we will look as some of the basic Gmail features that we might be missing or ignore over a period of time.

Maximum page sizes: For those of us, who receive a large number of emails every day, it is sometimes annoying to click on older email link and go to next page. What we can do instead is increase the number of email we want to see in one page. Go to Mail settings by clicking the gear shaped button on the top right corner of the page. Click General -> Maximum page size and specify the number of conversation you want in one single page.

Add signature just like in outlook: Every time you send an email, you don’t need to write “Thanks & Regards- your name etc…” at the end of email. You can create a signature by going to Mail settings–> General ->Signature. Edit and save a signature for all your future emails.

Vacation reminder: You are going on a vacation and don’t want to offend others by not replying to their emails. You can set a vacation reminder in Mail settings -> General -> Vacation responder. Here you can specify the start and end date of the vacation, subject and a message. The message can read, “I am on a leave for 5 days. I will respond to your email as soon as I am back. Thanks for contacting me.”

Important mail and contacts: This is one feature that I personally like very much. It helps me manage different email accounts from one single interface. Using this feature I can import my emails from other accounts like Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL. I don’t need to personally log in to each account. To use this feature go to Mail settings -> Accounts and Imports -> Import mail and contacts. We can also avoid the use of maintaining multiple accounts by the methods discussed in this post.

Show my web clips above the inbox: Want to know what is happening in the stock market or the gadget industry. Well you don’t need to log out of Gmail anymore. Go to Mail settings ->Web Clips. In the search box located on the left hand side enter the text you want to search and press the ‘search’ button. For example searching ‘Insurance in India’ returns a number of results related to insurance. Now I can choose the one I like and Gmail will be displaying them above my Inbox. I used this feature a lot in my company, as the firewall did not allow me to check stock prices. Here I was, checking stock news by logging into my Gmail account.

There are lots of cooler Gmail features and we will be discussing them further in another post. My personal favourite and the coolest are yet to come!