Gmail Basics

Here are the basics of Gmail from customizing your inbox to setting up email forwarding.

Inbox

You inbox is where you're probably going to spend most of your time reading and writing emails.

The Gmail inbox is set up fairly straightforwardly. Your messages appear in the main larger column and a smaller navigation sidebar is on the left hand side. The most important buttons are probably the Compose button, at the top of the left hand sidebar, and the Settings button, at the top right hand corner of the page.

- The compose button allows you to create messages to other people. Clicking it will bring up a new message in the right corner of your screen. Gmail automatically saves any work that you do so if you accidently close the new message it will be saved in your drafts folder. If you want to delete the message without sending it there is a small trash can icon in the bottom right corner of the new message that will discard the message without saving it (it will also delete the draft if you reopened it from there).
- The settings icon holds a variety of quick settings that are useful to be able to access quickly. A full list of settings can be found within the drop down menu and completely changes the screen when you click it.

Customization

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 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.

Contacts

Your contacts are the people that you send emails to. There are many fields in a contact card but not all of them need to be filled if they aren't relevant. Your contacts sync with your Google account so if you add your account to another device such as a smartphone or tablet then all of your contacts attached to your Gmail will be in your phone. This is useful for aggregating all your contacts and their info in one place.

To access your contacts click on Mail At the very top of the left sidebar and select Contacts from the drop down menu. You can also view your contacts in the contacts app by clicking on the apps menu (the square of nine smaller squares in the top right corner and selecting Contacts from the menu.

On your school Gmail accounts there are many different pages for your contacts. Your My Contacts section are contacts that you have added manually yourself; most contacted are the poeple you message most frequently; other contacts are people that you have sent emails to, these are the addresses that Gmail will autocomplete for you when you send emails to them again; and the directory are the people in your district. You can create other groups to further organize your contacts so you can find people easily, just click New Group.

Filters

Filters are a way to automatically perform a variety of actions to incoming (or already received mail). The most common use of filters is to automatically apply a label to certain mail for more information on filters and labels see here. The easiest way to create a filter is to save a search as a filter. Simply search for a certain criteria of mail such as all mail from a specific person or to a specific list and then click Create a filter with this search at the bottom right corner of the search popup. From there you can select the actions that you wish the filter to perform such as archiving, adding a label, or marking the message as read.

Forwarding

If you have multiple email addresses sometimes it is useful to forward mail between accounts. You can set Gmail to forward all of your mail to a different email address or certain mail with a filter.

To set up forwarding all mail go to the Settings and then the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. You can set it to forward all mail to a certain email address and either, keep the mail, leaving it unread; keep the mail in the inbox, marking it as read; archive the mail; or delete the mail.

If you only want to forward some messages to another email address then you can use a filter to do so. For more information about filters see here. Using the filter method will keep an unread copy of the forwarded mail in your inbox.

Labels

In Gmail labels work similar to folders with one huge advantage: you can apply more than one label to an email. Labels make it very easy to organize and sort through your inbox at a glance. You can make it even easier by assigning specific colors to labels of your choosing and really helping them stand out. Once you've created a label you can find all the messages with that label via search or clicking on the label in the left hand bar in Gmail. You can easily create, edit, and delete existing labels. Labels can be nested too and applied automatically with the use of filters. Using labels is the best way to efficiently organize your inbox and reduce clutter. For a more in depth discussion on the creating and editing of labels see here.

Labs

Google labs are additional features that developers have created that are not included in the official Gmail app. There are some useful features in google labs but all of the things in labs are experimental and as the disclaimer at the top of the labs page says they may change, break, or disappear at any time without warning. To enable labs go to the Settings page and click on the Labs tab. Browse the labs until you find one you think is useful and that you'd like and click Enable. Then you'll need to click Save Changes at the top for the labs to take effect.

If you do enable labs and your email is taking a while to load, or you think there is a broken feature, then you can use this link to open Gmail without any labs enabled and change the settings to disable the troublesome feature.

Password

Your Gmail password is synced to your Windows AD password. To change this go to any Windows computer and press ctrl+alt+delete then select change password. It might take a few minutes for the changes to propagate through all the systems.

POP/IMAP

POP and IMAP are two different protocols for reading emails on a different server. Their primary uses are that they allow you to read your mail in an email client such as outlook or the email app on your phone. Most modern apps use IMAP now and it is the preferred standard since POP just downloads your emails to the device and if you read or delete a message on one device the changes are only made locally. This means that when you check your email on a different device the emails are downloaded again since the server has no way of knowing that you're already read or deleted the email. This leads to you having to read and delete the same emails over and over again which is tedious and most people prefer not to do this. IMAP is also safer since it allows the use of encrypted emails. The main noticeable benefit is that with IMAP changes you make to emails are sent back to the server so when you read, delete, or archive an email the change propagates across all your devices. Your folders and labels are also shared across your devices.

To enable IMAP or POP open your Settings page and click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Scroll down to either POP or IMAP and click on enable.

Signature

In Gmail you can set a signature that will appear at the bottom of all your outgoing emails. This can be found in the Settings page under General settings. You can set your signature to anything you wish but typically it consists of your name, contact information and information about your title.

By default your signature will appear at the very bottom of the email, even when forwarding or replying to mail with quoted text. You can change this so your email always appears at the end of whatever you type as a message by checking the box under the text box in the settings that says "Insert this signature before quoted text in replies and remove the "--" line that precedes it." This will, as it implies also remove the "--" that typically separates your signature from the body of your message. If you are particularly attached to this separator you can just add it to your signature.

Spam

Your spam folder is found in the sidebar on the left side of the page. Google automatically pulls messages out of your inbox that it thinks are spam or malicious messages although sometimes the algorithms that decide what is spam are a bit overzealous and mark safe mail as spam. To correct this and help the algorithms learn to filter out actual spam you should check your spam folder somewhat regularly and click Not spam on messages that you feel are not spam. If you do receive messages that are spam in your inbox you can mark them as spam and in the future Google will try to filter out similar messages. Messages in spam will be automatically deleted after 30 days.

Stars

Stars in Gmail are a useful way to mark important mail from less important mail. You can star messages and they will appear in your Primary inbox no matter what they are usually categorized as. You can find all your starred mail in the Starred label in the left sidebar. To star a message click on the star next to the message. You can also star archived mail in order to find it easily even if you don't need it in you inbox anymore. You can enable a variety of different stars in the Settings page under the General tab. To switch the type of star simply keep clicking on the star icon next to the message. The stars will rotate through in the order that they are displayed on the settings page. To unstar a message just click the star until the star field is blank again.

Tasks

Tasks are an easy way to make checklists. You can access the tasks popup by clicking Mail at the top of the sidebar and selecting Tasks from the dropdown menu. To create a task simply click the plus at the bottom of the tasks popup. To mark the task as complete check the box next to the task. The task will become crossed out, but it will not be deleted until the trash can icon at the bottom of the popup is clicked.

You can create many lists of different tasks. To change lists or create new lists click on the rightmost buton on the bottom of the tasks popup. You can add information to a tasak such as a due date by clicking on the sideways arrow, >, next to the task when you mouse over it.

Trash

When you delete messages in Gmail they aren't automatically deleted. They are actually moved to a separate folder called the Trash. This folder can be accessed from the sidebar under More. Messages that are in the trash for more than 30 days are automatically deleted. This system can save you if you accidently delete a message. You can of course undo the deletion immediately by clicking undo in the notification that pops up, but if you miss that, and the 30 day limit hasn't been reached, you can move the message back to your inbox by opening the message from the trash (or by searching for it), and deleting the trash label by clicking the small x next to the label name next to the subject of the email.

Vacation Responder

If you are going to be away for a period of time and not checking email it is often a good idea to set up a vacation reminder to let people know that you are on vacation. When people send you email the vacation responder will automatically reply to that email with a predetermined message that you enter. You can put whatever you want in a vacation responder. Usually they consist of a statement saying you're away and won't be checking email and list a date when you will be returning.

You can reach the vacation responder in the Settings page under General. You can set a vacation responder to start at a specified date and either leave an end date when it will stop automatically responding or just let it keep going until you turn it off.