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You can customize the way that your inbox looks quite a bit. To do so click on the Settings icon and then click on Settings to open up all the Gmail settings. There are a number of settings in the General tab of the settings page that can be used to customize your email experience. The most prominent being the number of messages per page. The default is 50 messages per page but it can be set from as little as 10 to as high as 100.
Changing your default text style can be done here so if you don't like the default mail style and change yours you can change it here once and not have to worry about changing it for every message. Conversation View changes the way messages are grouped together. By default Conversation view View is on, which means that messages with the same subject are grouped together in one thread. If this feature is turned off messages will show up individually. A useful feature is Undo Send which will delay the actual sending of your messages by the amount of time specified. This allows you to "undo" the sending of your messages. This is a particularly useful feature in case you forget to attach a file (although Gmail will usually remind you if you reference an attachment in the body of an email and there is nothing attached) or make some other mistake that you remember after you've already hit the send button.
You can change the different types of stars for starred messages. To change the type of the star just keep clicking on the star next to the message. The stars will change through in the order that they appear in the settings. Desktop notifications will give you a notification that you got an email even when Gmail is not your active tab in Chrome. You do need to be signed in and have Gmail open in a tab on your computer.
You can set your picture that other users will see when you email them from the settings. The people widget is the contact information that appears in the top right corner of messages when you open them. Create contacts for auto-complete will allow Gmail to auto-complete email addresses for people that you have already emailed. You can set a signature that will always display at the bottom of your emails by default. If the box under the Signature text box is checked your signature will appear before the quoted text from previous conversations instead of appended to the bottom.
Personal level indicators are a good way to quickly find messages that are addressed directly to you and not to a mailing list. This feature is slightly less useful if you use the forums category since messages sent to mailing lists are aggregated under that category anyway, but they are still useful in seeing messages that are sent to a group of people versus only you. Snippets will control if the content of an email will be displayed in the mailbox or only the subject line. When turned on the beginning of the message, as much as will fit on one line, will be displayed in the mailbox after the subject of the email.
Finally in the general tab, you can set your vacation responder which will auto respond to any message received with a message of your choosing for either a set period of time or an indefinite amount of time. For more information of the vacation responder see below.
Archive
Archiving emails is a great way to free your inbox of clutter while keeping all of your emails around for reference. Archiving emails allows you to remove the emails from your inbox so when you open your email your inbox looks clean, while still having access to older emails.
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