I’ve got a bunch of gmail addresses, which I’ve been using mostly for junk accounts, unimportant emails that places bug me for but which I don’t want to receive their incessant messages on, etc, and I just realized that I don’t know how to use it. I don’t for example know the distinction between their “star” and “favorites” and “select” but now it occurred to me that it may be handy to know what the heck these things are, and how to use them. I’d like to organize my gmails by sender, but don’t know how to do that, or if I can. I’m not real good with icons in general, but suspect that I should be. Is there a guide that explains how gmail works, or gives tips to using it efficiently, etc? My main email is an Outlook account, which I can use well enough, but it would be nice if I could have the same (mediocre) level of skills on gmail.
Here ya go:
Enjoy.
Your public library no doubt offers several resources for developing those skills. Try a catalog search there, as well as asking a librarian if they have services or programs related to email skills.
The underlying philosophy behind Gmail is that you just keep everything around, and don’t need to organize it, because when you want something, you search. Want to see all the messages from a sender? Search for the sender (by either name or address; it’ll understand either). Want to find that message about a particular subject? Search for that subject. Got some messages that have long since become irrelevant? Don’t worry about them; just let them sit unnoticed buried under recent messages. No need to delete them; you’re at less than 1% of your allowed storage. Unless, of course, that message does somehow become relevant, and then it’s only a search away, and aren’t you glad you didn’t have to delete it?
Yes, THIS!
We used to teach computer graphics students how to organize all their files: their projects by client name, their graphics by which logo/web site/brochure they were used in, and their entire hard drives. And their backup hard drives.
But now, all that organizational skill AND TIME AND ENERGY is mostly wasted. If I can spend 3 seconds searching for “DönkeyButtLogoRGBwebFINAL”, then why bother with finding the right folder, then navigating til I see WebSiteFINAL, then drilling down and down to find the correct DönkeyButt?
So I guess I’m using Gmail the correct way!
I thought I was just being lazy, leaving everything unlabeled, unsorted, and mostly uncared for. But, hey, I’m being techie like “all them kids these days”!
W00†, ya dadburn whippersnappers!
Oh, the one thing that hasn’t worked for me is having a couple of Gmail accounts (I’d gotten two; one for serious mail, and one to be filled with junk mail by The Menacing Marketing Minions of Malebolgia).
But launching Gmail, or clicking on Gmail from google dot com in a browser, always takes me to my first Gmail account. And it seems impossible to switch accounts. My wife’s given up checking her email on “my” laptop, because it keeps defaulting back to my account.
Yes. A problem for me–I’ve created several separate Gmail accounts, mostly to handle junk mail of various types, and find switching difficult, mainly cause I can’t remember how I did it the last time. I wonder what icon to click on, or right-click on, and what to do once I get it clicked.
Almost as recommended by several posts above, I keep my gmail usage style very simple, and I don’t go hogwild with every fancy feature. (My usage may be constrained by the fact that I keep JavaScript disabled most of the time.)
Two features that OP (and others) may find useful are Labels and Filters.
Labels are kinda-sorta like Folders but not quite. One feature is that you can attach multiple labels to a message, giving the appearance that it can be in multiple “folders” at the same time. Thus, you can organize mail into “folders” by sender and also by subject all at the same time. Messages can also have a label attached while still remaining in your Inbox or in your Sent Mail folder.
Filters allow you to apply various criteria to each incoming message as in comes in, and whenever an incoming messages matches some criterion, you have several choices as to what action will automatically happen. One choice is to have messages that ping a certain filter be automatically immediately deleted. Another choice is to have messages that ping a certain filter automatically have a label of your choice applied. Thus, you can automatically have messages from a certain sender all given a particular label.
It’s also worth looking at all the Search options. There are quite a lot of them, many of which are the same as general Google search options, but some others that are specific for mail messages.
If you click on the avatar/icon in the upper right corner, you can add accounts that will then be listed the next time you click the avatar.
And you can even bookmark the different URLs you get if you open the second account, as they will have a different number. This is what I did to make it easy for any of us at my house to easily check their Gmail.
The only caveat is that, if you ever get logged back out, you have to make sure you log back in in the correct order, or the bookmarks will go tot he wrong accounts.
Wife and I solved that issue – Firefox defaulted to my account, and Chrome to hers.
I forgot to say: the difference between star and important is that important only marks messages until you read them, while starred messages stay starred until you unstar them.
Personally, I don’t really use either one: if a message is one I want to mark as important or want to remind myself of later, I mark it as unread, and I used the unread inbox on top, so that all my unread ones are up there.
And I definitely still sort email. That’s what tags are for. Search is nice, but it doesn’t take the place of being able to group things by type, as you can’t exactly search for the type of email. But I can make sure that all my game codes go to one folder, my bug report replies go to another (and don’t touch touch my inbox), that messages I send myself (e.g. a link from another device) go in another folder, and so on.
I don’t organize as much, but I definitely autosort. Heck, I even sort any emails that use my account without a dot, as I know those are either spam or this one guy who keeps mistyping/writing his email address and lives in Georgia. (Though there’s this other guy who keeps sign up for 2K sports, and apparently can’t figure out why he never gets the email to log in.)
There’s a million resources online, but I have found this particular set of guides to be useful again and again:
A general tip: don’t forget this is a Google product, and search functions behave much like they do in a Google search. Examples:
- Putting quotes around phrases returns the exact phrase only
- Using a minus sign (hyphen, no space) omits results containing the specified word
- Using a plus sign (no space) restricts results to that exact term, no variants (e.g. +chairs returns only “chairs” but not “chair”)
Finally, I don’t know how relevant this is to a home user, but at work if you have hundreds of thousands of emails, many with attachments, you may find that a search term results in too many hits in the attachments but not in the body.
For example, if I want to find a conversation about Widget #84877339 which I’m sure I had with a client last month, and I search for that widget number, the result will include every spreadsheet attachment with that number in it. If someone sends out a complete updated widget spreadsheet every day, always containing that one with all the others, I’m looking at way too many false hits.
One cure for that is to use the minus sign on a search condition: in this case, “-has:attachment” omits results with an attachment, restricting the results to cases when somebody mentioned Widget #84877339 in the body of the email. (There’s probably a better way to do that, that would catch hits in the body only and still allow unrelated attachments, but I can’t find it.)