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GMail Tips and Tricks

Added Apr 03, 2020 •

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Hey everybody today I would like to talk to you about Gmail and some tips and some neat tricks I've picked up over time that really helps me in managing my email box.  To dive right into it on the start with labels and some of you are likely already familiar with those but I think that is a good place to start as a lot of the more advanced techniques are going to take advantage of labels now, first I want to kinda take a look over at this sidebar here.  The way that Google is set up is this sidebar is split up into two portals if you will, one is your navigation tree, and this will show you your labels and some other options for your Gmail account but then this lower section here is tied to Hangouts.  Now because I prefer to use Hangouts through my extension or through the web browser I almost never work with Hangouts directly through GMail while I do use Hangouts frequently and I highly encourage using it, I haven't found too much use here in GMail. So what I like to do to give myself some more space over here it's just take this and drop it all the way down. Hide it...get rid of it. So now we got some more room up here now if I click on more I can create a new label this is just one way to create a new label there's actually several different ways and you'll kind of see them throughout this video, but this is probably the most basic way to do it.  Right now just looking at my mailbox, just glancing at it, I can tell that it's pretty clogged up with these Google security alerts and maybe you've noticed these as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to create a label for these, just so I have a place to put them. I don't really want to delete them...and again maybe this isn't too realistic of an example but maybe this could be for another type of email tree that you get or some type of weekly news letter, or maybe a group...it could be applied to a lot of different situations, I'm just using this one because it is the most obvious right now for me. I will create a new label, and call it Google Security Alerts and nesting is Google's way of organizing these labels, it is the same idea as folders on computer, you can have folders in folders just like you can have labels under labels, but in this example I am just gonna put it right on the root so there it is, now I've created a new one. What I can do now is...say a security alert comes in I can go up here and say 'Move To' ...'Google Security Alerts' so it disappears from my inbox and now it'll show up under this label. that is sort of powerfull... I mean that is definitely handy but you are doing a lot of manual work to kinda organize your email box but right away you might be thinking 'that is a lot of clicks to get one email into a label!'  There's another way that you can utilize some artificial intelligence to have Google automatically do some of this work for you and that starts with the filters and labels...or the Filters and Blocked Addresses here.  We are gonna create a new filter. and I know that all of the Google security alerts they all come from the same address... they all come from this 'no-reply@accounts.google.com' I can just stay right there that's all I need to know but you can kind of see here there's lots things you can do to kind of trigger Google to recognize an email whether it's maybe if it's 'To' if you have an alias that you're using or to a group that you're a part of that you can recognize it through the 'To' section, you can, if there is an email you always has the same subject line you can have it trigger, or find it through that just simply by looking for words inside the email itself. So, in this case all I really need to know is this so I'm gonna create a filter off of that What I'm gonna do is, I don't really want them clogging up my email box, I just want them to go straight into that label, so I'm actually going to 'Skip my email box' I'm going to apply the label 'Google Security Alerts' and I'm also going to apply it to all the matching...all the ones that are already there. Once you see this scree again, that means its done. So, here we have this one matching filter. Now, if I come back to my inbox, look at that they are already all gone.  They've all been moved into the security alerts group furthermore because that's set up as a constant filter, any new ones coming in will not clog up my email box, they'll just go straight into this label. Okay now I want to take that idea and apply it in a way you might find more useful.  What I can do is I can have it start marking group lists as well and so if you're part of Google Groups which I know many of us are at the very least like the AHS and MHS groups we can set up a quick filter to automatically start tagging those to make managing them a lot easier. And I'm going to show you a little bit of a quicker way to do it rather than going through the settings and the filters. So here I've created this Google Group of one just to show you how this works, you can see that this is being sent to the 'filter-test' group not directly to to me here so what I'm going to do is I want to mark these I can go over here to this 'more options' and say 'filter messages like this' and it will try to do what's best to figure out identifying information from from this because Google's pretty smart it automatically detected that 'Hey I'm looking for for this list' so great I want to create that filter. In this case though, I don't really want to skip the inbox because I still want to read it or still be able to see them but at the same time I do want to apply a label and I haven't created a label yet, so I can actually create a new label right from inside this creation window here.  So I am going to go to 'New label' and I'm going to say 'Filter Group Test Emails'.  And again I'm not going to nest it under anything. Create that label, apply the label, and I'm going to apply it to the matching conversations. Back in my inbox, now you can see that this email has a tag on it...it's still in my email box, it didn't automatically move it over there, it's still here but it has this 'tag', and so what I can do now is maybe I can just, I don't even need to open it, maybe it's short enough where I can just read the little synopsis here and get the... get what I need out of the email, and then if I archive it, it goes out of my email box... But, it's still tagged with this filter so I can always go back and reference it in one central location.  It makes it very easy to manage if you can just click on that archive button and have it automatically go into the label you want it to go into.  That to me has been very very useful and you can set up filters like that for individual people, you can set it up for just about any email or consistent email that you like, and that is pretty powerful. So along similar lines we can start utilizing the star over here now I use the star a lot and it can be used to great effect but it may not be for everybody as many of you can probably empathize with I get a lot of emails and sometimes I just can't get to them right away and there are situations where I'm looking at an email, say this one's like 'shoot, this meeting's recording...I know I have to do something with this, I don't have the time right now but my email box is filling up and I need to get it out my way and I will address it later.'  So what I will do is I will mark it with a star.  And say it's the same thing here, I need to do these but they can kinda be put on the back burner for right now. Once I star them I can archive them and kinda just get 'em out of my way.  Now later on down the road I have a little bit of time, I can come over here to the starred and then start going through these that are kind of in the waiting box if you will. That's another way you can kind of try to organize or prioritize things just with a few simple clicks Finally, I would like to talk about something that is mostly unknown as it is kind of hidden in Gmail but is something that if you are really used to using keyboard shortcuts can save an immense amount of time and I do recognize this isn't for everybody but if you're like me and live on the keyboard, there's a really, really useful feature in Gmail called the 'Keyboard Shortcuts' and you have to enable it, it's disabled by default.  You'll have to go into your gear wheel and into Settings and in here is the Keyboard Shortcuts. It's most of the way down and if you turn those on, that enables a lot of neat little features in Gmail and also note that not only do you have to turn it on, you also have to come down here and save your changes. So now there's lots of hot keys that you can use.  The ones that by far I use the most is...well 'e' I use all the time, the letter 'e' as in elephant that is 'archive'. So for example, we talked earlier about how this has been been marked already I can open this up, glance at it, read it hit the 'e' key, it'll automatically archive the conversation and throw it into the... the label I just also applies, like if I check a bunch of them and then press 'e'...they're gone... they've been archived.  Another one is 'r' for reply, so if I'm in here, I'm in the middle of a thread I can just press 'r' and then start typing 'I am bored' to send it I can press Ctrl... press and hold Ctrl and hit enter so I can have a whole conversation without ever clicking an actual button...reply again and just keep going back and forth like that. Furthermore, the 'a' key as an apple is Reply All so say there is a thread where your communicating with multiple people at once and I do recognize that Reply All is used a little bit more than it should be but you can just press the 'a' key and have it reply to all as well. There are some other ones that are a little bit lesser used the bracket keys which are the ones next to the backslash there in between the backslash in the 'p' as in 'party' keys.  If you press the Open Bracket it will archive this conversation and then move to the next one and but because I've no more emails here that's not going to work and inversely the close bracket will archive the current one and move to the previous one.  The 'j'... I think it's the 'j' and 'u' keys will let you just flip through your emails back and forth without archiving or anything, just going straight from one e-mail to another and you can see a whole list of all of these on this website here you can just do a quick Google search for the Gmail keyboard shortcuts and all of them are listed in here but like I said I don't use even a quarter of these by far the 'e' and the 'r' keys ...and the control + enter to send I use constantly and...that time adds up when clicking, and clicking the 'reply' button, replying, clicking on the 'send' button, clicking on your next email, those things add up and being able to just kind of rest your hand over the the 'e' key, and just having it there can you can be really efficient in managing your emails. Finally, I would like to talk about extensions.  There are a lot of extensions out there that can help with Gmail.  I mean if you're willing to spend a couple dollars, the Active Inbox extension is really really useful if you're slammed with tasks that...it allows you to turn your Gmail account basically into a a task organizer and it's really powerful but it is not free. I will provide some information that links to that in this video, at the bottom of this video under you here but I do want to point out a free one that I use constantly. I'm going to show you my inbox now if you noticed if you're in a conversation I'm going to go back to that conversation view. By default, Gmail puts the most recent communication on the bottom and the least recent on top personally I don't like that I like it to be the exact opposite but because I can't do this I'm using Firefox because I'm running multiple accounts at once if you get the reverse Gmail conversation you can see that it is the opposite.  It puts the most recent conversation on top in the least one at the bottom which to me that is a lot more... it is a lot easier for me to read that way. But again that's a personal thing, I've heard from people that feel the exact opposite, but I did want you to know that that is an option and I'll provide that link as well. It's called: Reverse Conversation for Gmail. And there it is. I hope these tips help you as much as they've helped me and if you have any questions, please reach out!

Uploaded by Timothy Oliveira. Listed in Technology Resources

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GMail Tips and Tricks

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