Gmail Tricks and Tips

For those of you who are new to Google’s mail solution Gmail, or think you may have seen everything, here are a couple of things that you may not have known about Gmail and things that you can do with it. 

In comparison to Hotmail, Gmail is a bit more sophisticated as it tends to hide some of the tasks that are dead obvious in Hotmail like forwarding mail. Even making a new email needs some getting used to, but that is relatively easy.

Gmail has a great array of features that Hotmail doesn’t have.

• It has Buzz, which allows you to share interesting articles with your contacts.
• It separates emails that are labeled as important from the rest of the mail and even has a special stars status that it sorts automatically.
• Streamlined in Gmail on the left hand toolbar comes a built in chat client which even allows calls to selected contacts or telephones.

Some New Tricks to Consider

1. You can select multiple email addresses by clicking the first one and then pressing shift while clicking the last in a series that you want to select.
2. Gmail will prompt you if you don’t write anything in the body of a message. For those that only need to send an attachment and don’t care about the message in itself, the prompt may be a bit annoying. This can be solved in the subject header where you type “EOM” at the end of a subject header.
3. Like to use aliases? Sure, Hotmail got a great, new, simplified way of making aliases for your Hotmail account, but with this neat trick, Gmail users can do that as well. If you add a + at the end of your username and add some text, you have just created an alias. Messages that are sent to username+alias@gmail.com will be sent to username@gmail.com. While this is primitive in comparison to Hotmail's aliases where they are standalone addresses, one can use this to sort their emails and figure out who has been giving your email to spammers.
4. Google doesn’t recognize dots when you create a username. Therefore, if you want your email address to be user.name@gmail.com instead of username@gmail.com, you can just use user.name@gmail.com and you will still receive the email. You can even put a dot between every letter and the result would be the same.
5. Gmail has this thing call labs which allows its users to make and download plugins for their Gmail service. This can be handy if you want to add a functionality to Gmail and it exists. Say for example, that you want to Archive your messages at the same time as you send them. Go to the labs section in your Mail Settings and enable the Send & Archive button in the list.

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