Apply These Suggestions to Get the Most from Your Gmail Account

Gmail is one of the most popular free email systems, but most users are only scratching the surface of what it can actually do. Here are a few things that you may or may not have known are possible with your Gmail account.

One of the built-in features is keyboard shortcuts. Some of these shortcuts are automatically available. For example, Ctrl+Enter will send your already composed message and Ctrl+Shift+b will add a Bcc recipient. Other shortcuts are automatically off but can easily be turned on. These include using the letters n and p to call up the next or previous email and the letter e for automatically archiving the current conversation.

Are you having trouble finding a message, even with the search bar? Do you have the general idea of when it was received? You can use dates to search for emails. For example, if you know you got the email this month, type “after:yyyy/mm/dd” using the date you think would be the oldest it could have been. This will give you all of the emails that are more recent than the date entered. The “before:” command works too.

Do you like the tabs that Google added to separate your emails into categories? What if you feel an email has been misfiled? Just click and drag the email to the correct tab. Google will ask you if it should remember your preference.

Sometimes an email is special and requires marking the star. Unfortunately, over time so many stars get marked that the messages will not stand out as much. What can you do? In the settings, check out the section on stars under the general tab. The preset is the one yellow star, but you can actually use up to six different color stars and several other symbols to mark messages relevant and still keep them categorized.

Also, do not keep switching between Gmail and your other accounts. Just use the advanced sorting function to forward all of your emails to your Google account. When it asks what account you want to import from, you just type in your other email address, and Google will take care of the rest.