Gmail tips & tricks

Archiving

Gmails best function (according to me) is definitely the Archiving feature. This allows you to mark an Email-message, as "not important enough to keep in the inbox, but not unimportant enough to delete", which just keeps a copy of your mail, but not in the inbox. That way you can keep a clean inbox, without losing any data. (When search, archived mail is automatically searched as well)

Searching

The search-function of Gmail, is its strongest side to-date. The search function easily and quickly searches through several gigabytes of emails in a matter of microseconds. When using it together with some of its more special features, you can easily find almost any email ever sent or received, based on the few things you remember about it.

Special Things

There are a few special search phrases that really can be useful. For example to find an email-message you wrote, with an attachment, sometime around december in 2007, the search-query would be "from:me has:attachment after:2007-11-30 before:2008-01-01".

Special search-tags

The search-tags that are available are:

Any search-tag can be negated by the use of a "-" before the search-tag.

Labels

Gmail has decided against using conventional folders, and instead uses "Labels", also known by the public as "tags". This means that you can assign a message several labels, and use any (or many) labels in the search to find these messages.

One neat way to use this, is to have a label for work-related mail, another for account information (login-information, and account-registrations), and another for an interest organization, for example...

Then you can search for "label:work label:account" to find any work-related account-emails.

IMAP

Filters

When you start to receive large amount of mails, filters are your friend. You can use filters to automatically assign labels, forward, archive, star, remove, or mark emails as spam. If you are part of some email-based newsgroup, you can set up a filter that automatically assigns those emails an label for that newsgroup, If you're forwarding emails from another email-account, you can create a filter so that those mails get a label for that... You can create a filter that automatically deletes mails that comes from your ex-girl/boyfriend... With filters you can automate a lot of your otherwise manual labor.

Second Email-address, and more

Gmail has support for acting as another email-account. As long as you have POP-access to the account, you can manage that email-account through Gmail. That works by Gmail fetches you'r emails via POP from that account, presents it to you in the Gmail interface.

And you can also configure your gmail account to send emails, posing as your other email account. (But first you must via Gmail send that account an confirmation code, that you must give back to Gmail).

You configure this in the Settings menu, accounts-tab.
Gmail help about Accounts.

Additional Email-adresses to your own account.

Gmail has some neat features that allows you to give out email-adresses that are not quite your "real one" but close enough, so that Gmail deliveres it to the right spot. There are two different techniques you can use for this.

Dots

When Gmail recieves an email to deliver to someone the first thing they do is strip out any dot's (for example if your email is john.doe@gmail.com, your internal gmail-accountname would be johndoe, and after stripping out any dots gmail will deliver any combination of dots to your account even if you send it to johndoe@gmail.com or j.o.h.n.d.o.e@gmail.com or john.....doe....@gmail.com). This is useful if you wish to trace where an email comes from, but they don't think that "+"-signs are valid parts of an email-address.

Plus-addressing

When Gmail recives an email with an plus-sign somewhere in it, it will automatically strip of everything from the plus-sign to the at-sign in the email. So mails addressed to john.doe+newsletter@gmail.com will be delivered to the johndoe@gmail.com adress. This is really useful if you wish to trace back where the message author got your email address from.

Security

Gmail has the support for using SSL-connections (and even enforces it, at some times) which means that you are safe against man-in-the-middle-attacks[1] by encrypting the connection between your browser and Gmail.

SSL-connections are enforced when logging in via the web-interface, and whenever you are accessing Gmail via POP, IMAP orSMTP. However after you've logged in, you might be bounced back into a standard HTTP-connection (non-SSL). If you go to gmail with a https-address then you will use an SSL-connection the entire time, and will be secure from man-in-the-middle-attacks.

Now Gmail offers an option to force the use of SSL connection all through the web-interface session. This is selected in the settings, menu, general-tab. Near the bottom.

Third-party clients

Gmail has support for using third-party clients to access your email via POP, IMAP and SMTP over SSL-connections. This feature allows you to use any email-client of your choice. For example, if you are not a fan of the conversation-threading in Gmail, or you want to sort your emails, you need to use a third-party application.

IMAP

POP

Other Settings

Vacation Message

Signature

Keyboard Shortcuts

Labs

Labs features are features that are good enough to be allowed out to the public, but perhaps not stable or good enough to be released to the general-public, therefore labs-features are moved away, and somewhat hidden. In the Labs-section you can also find different functionalities that everyone might not want, such as automatically previewing youtube videos directly in the email, instead of forcing you to click the link, and go to youtube's page.