Are You Using These Gmail Features?

Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. It first became available in 2007 and quickly became one of the most popular web email platforms. It has an amazing array of features that can keep you more organized, more productive, and less encumbered by clutter (like junk email). Besides its usefulness as an email platform, Gmail also works like a personal database. It allows you to easily search and find information from emails you’ve sent or received in the past. With its recent incorporation into Google Drive (Google’s free cloud-based storage system), Gmail users are now given fifteen gigabytes of storage that may be shared with the other services offered under Google Drive.

Here are some of the great features of Gmail:

Search functions. Organizing email used to mean creating folders for saving different messages. Gmail has such a robust system for searching emails that folders aren’t necessary. You may search by various parts of an email: by subject line, message text, address, etc. You may search during particular time frames, and filter your results by including and excluding certain words.

Labels. Labels are like tags you use to categorize your emails. You can set labels like “Facebook” for all notifications that come from Facebook, or “Amazon” for any email related to purchases you made on Amazon.com. Labels allow you to quickly see all of the emails from a certain person, place, type, or category. They also work well in conjunction with other features of Gmail, such as searches and filters

Filters. Filters are simply fantastic. They allow you to automate certain things to save you time every day. With a filter, you can program actions to happen automatically whenever an email arrives. For example, if there are junk mail messages that you’re tired of seeing, you can create a filter for them to be deleted automatically. If there are certain emails that you think an associate needs to see, create a filter to forward the messages automatically. You can also program some messages to skip the inbox. (For example, I have a label called “Amazon” and a filter set for messages from Amazon.com to skip my inbox. I don’t need to read the messages every time I order something from Amazon.com. But if I want to read them, I can easily do so by clicking on that label name.)

Import email accounts. Gmail allows you to import other email accounts, so they can be managed within your Gmail account. When you write emails you can decide which sender-address you want to show on the email. For example, I use Gmail to manage an AOL email account. When I reply to messages, I show the AOL address as the sender. (This only works with email providers that allow POP3 access).