Organizing your Gmail Inbox

The new tabbed inbox option in Gmail has prompted many questions about message organisation from users who may not have considered managing their inboxes in the past.

So it seems worthwhile to set out in one place how you can manage your mail using one of the several inbox types built into Gmail.

Classic Inbox
Unread First - Starred First - Important First
Priority Inbox
Multiple Inboxes
Tabbed and Categorised Inbox
How to turn Tabs and Categories off again!
Summary and Useful Links

“Classic” Inbox (now called Default)

There’s a full rundown with lots of screenshots on how to manage a Gmail “Classic” Inbox using labels, stars, archiving, etc, in Chapter 5 of my blog post called Gmail 101 - find it here: http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/gmail-101.html?utm_source=BP_recent#organize1

But briefly, this is the original and most basic view of a Gmail account’s Inbox. All messages and conversations are listed in chronological order, newest on top, and appear in a continuous paged list with no organisation at all. You can choose in Settings/General how many messages/conversations to view on a page, to a max of 100. To move between pages, click the Older and Newer arrows in the upper right above the Inbox list.

How to turn it on
To get to this view, first choose Default (which has replaced “Classic” in the menu list) from the dropdown menu next to Inbox at the top of your label list on the left.



If you then see the new tabbed Inbox view, which splits your Inbox up into Categories, then you need to first turn off the tabs. Click the gear icon and choose Configure Inbox, and then uncheck all the tabs.



How to use it
That will put you into the Default view with just a primary inbox on display, and you can start to manage your mail using Gmail’s built in tools:

• Labels can be applied to messages to help visually distinguish them from others, either manually, or by using a filter to catch certain messages when they arrive and give them a specific label. You might choose one label for anything to do with Work, and another for mail relating to your Sports Club, etc.
• Colouring the labels aids visual recognition of particular labels.
• Users can change their view and see just those messages with a specific label by clicking that label in the lefthand sidebar. So it becomes easier to see all your Work mail together, or messages from members of your Sports Club, instead of seeing them spread throughout your Inbox list.
• As well as your own labels you can add stars to your mail, and then view all your starred mail together by clicking on the Starred label in your sidebar.
• You can then combine labelling and archiving to move messages out of your Inbox once you have dealt with them, but keep them available in your account so you can still see them when you click their label. The Labels and Archive buttons do that for you, and you can even do both jobs at once by using the Move button, which labels and archives a message with a single action.
• Mail you don’t want any more can simply be deleted - select the message and hit the Trash can button. But use this with care - mail you send to Trash will be deleted permanently 30 days later, and once deleted permanently it cannot be recovered.

Many users find that this “classic view” when combined with labels and stars, along with filtering and archiving, does all they require. But read on if you would like to know more...

Unread First - Starred First - Important First

These are ready-made selectable views of your Inbox, and as the name of each suggests, it will filter out some of your Inbox mail and place it in a separate section of its own at the top of your Inbox, with your remaining Inbox mail underneath in Everything Else.

How to turn it on
Simply click the dropdown menu next to Inbox at the top of your label list, and pick the view you want to use

How to use it
This view makes it easy to keep track of mail you haven’t yet read - or mail you have starred - or mail Gmail has marked for you as Important. Sections can be collapsed using the “twisty” next to their name if you want to temporarily get them out of your way.



(NB Unread First will not show you ALL the mail you haven’t read - only the mail which is unread and still in your Inbox. The same goes for Starred First and Important First - they relate only to mail still in your Inbox, not to mail you may have archived. To see ALL your Starred mail, or ALL the mail that has been tagged as Important, you can click those labels in your sidebar.)

All the normal Inbox functions such as labelling, archiving, starring, etc will work just as they do in the Classic inbox - with the proviso that mail that has its status changed by an action you take may move out of the top section and into Everything Else.. For example, mail you read will move out of Unread and into Everything Else. Mail you add a star to will move into Starred and out of Everything Else. Mail you “move” by adding a label and archiving it will disappear from your Inbox altogether, and so on.

The Important Marker
In an effort to help you prioritise your mail handling, Gmail has an automated feature that looks at a number of different indicators when a message arrives, and decides whether or not this message is likely to be important to you. Those indicators include things like how often you read mail from that person; how often you reply to mail from that sender; how frequently you correspond with that sender, etc. If it judges that the message is important, it is flagged with a yellow tag that appears in your message list. if you hover over the yellow tag, you will see the reason that Gmail marked the message as important.



If you disagree that the message is important, then click the yellow tag to turn it off.

Or if you see a message that IS important, but Gmail has missed it, click the blank placeholder to turn the tag on.



In this way you can train Gmail to assess your mail more accurately, and after a while, the automatic application of the yellow tag becomes pretty reliable!

If you don’t want to be bothered with the markers, you can turn them off in Settings/Inbox. On that page, you can also choose whether the Important marker should over-ride any of your own filters or not. For example, if you want mail from a certain sender to always skip the Inbox, even if it is marked Important, you would set the feature to NOT over-ride your filters.



If you don’t like this concept at all and don’t want Gmail to assess or tag your mail as Important, you can turn it off: create a filter that will trap all your incoming mail - a nonsense string like “poiuytrewq” in the Doesn’t Have box does that very reliably - and choose “Never Mark Important”.

Priority Inbox

You can extend the concept of Unread/Starred/Important First by using Priority Inbox. This offers you four user-definable “inboxes” at the top of your page, followed by Everything Else underneath. As with the more limited “First” views, if a message appears in one section it will not appear in any of the other sections underneath it.

How to turn it on
The Priority Inbox view can be turned on by clicking the dropdown menu next to Inbox at the top of your lefthand sidebar.

How to set it up
When you have enabled Priority Inbox, go to Settings/Inbox to set it up. The four definable sections can use any of the available configurations, in any order - and do not in fact have to be confined strictly to mail that is in your Inbox. You may find some default choices for the content of the first 2-3 sections, but these are configurable - just click Options to select what you want to see in each section. The first four options listed for your sections are “In Inbox and... Important & Unread, Important, Unread and Starred. These present your mail in much the same way as the “First” options we’ve already talked about. But as there can be more than one section, it’s important to remember that each section has priority over the ones below it.

For example, if you have an unread message in your Inbox that you have also starred, and you choose to show your “In Inbox and Unread” mail right at the top, then your unread starred message will appear in that section. It will not also appear in your “In Inbox and Starred” section which is the second section. But if you then read that message, it will no longer be Unread, so it will drop into the applicable section with the next highest priority - the “In Inbox and Starred section”. If you then unstar it, it will drop into Everything Else.

Other choices for your sections are
Any of your own labels - which shows all of them, in Inbox and archived
Any of Important, Starred, Sent Mail and Drafts - again, all of them, in Inbox and archived



How to use it
Experiment with the various sections and how you can define them to find an arrangement which suits you best. For example, I have an Action label which I like to see right up top, displaying all my mail with that label, whether or not I have archived it. Then I have my In Inbox and Unread section, and In Inbox and Starred comes third. I don’t define the fourth section, so Everything Else brings up the rear.

Once you are used to the way this works, it is an elegant solution to managing your mail, and keeping what’s important to you at the top of your list.

Multiple Inboxes

The Multiple Inboxes lab can be enabled in Settings/Labs and offers the most comprehensively user-definable Inbox you can have! In fact, if you can search for a certain type of message, you can define an Inbox section for it!

How to turn it on
Whereas all the other types of inbox can be selected from the dropdown next to Inbox at the top of your sidebar, you need to make a few adjustments manually to use this lab. So first choose Default (previously called “Classic”) from the Inbox type dropdown menu. If this shows the new tabbed Inbox view, then you need to turn off the tabs. Click the gear icon and choose Configure Inbox, and then uncheck all the tabs. Once you are in Default view with just a primary inbox on display, then you can configure the lab to show you up to five additional sections.





How to set it up
When enabled, Multiple Inboxes has its own Settings page, where you can configure the five extra Inboxes which will show along with your normal classic Inbox. These can appear to the right of your main Inbox list, or either above or below the main Inbox list. You can also pick how many messages/conversations to show in each section. Once you have defined each of your sections, you can - if you wish - archive the “found” messages from the Main inbox. They will still appear in their own section, but will be out of your way in your Main list.



Unlike Priority Inbox, Multiple Inboxes doesn’t work like a filter, but as a number of sets of search results - so you may see apparent duplicates in your different views if a message or conversation matches more than one of your definitions. And as already stated, the results you choose to show are limited only by Gmail’s search capability! You define a specific search for each box, and the messages displayed will be the results of that search.

For example, if you are working on a specific project for the next few weeks/months, and want to quickly be able to find emails containing all the new drawings and PDF spec sheets sent to you by the designers in the last 3 months, you could define a separate Inbox section with a search something like this:

label:ProjectA filename:jpg OR filename:pdf newer_than:3m from:drawingoffice@domain.com

That search will show you exactly what you want to see: all the mail with the project label, that has a JPG or PDF attachment, that’s less than three months old and is from the designers’ email address.

How to use it
Once set up, the mail shown in your Multiple Inboxes can be managed and handled in the same way with as all other mail.

Last but not least

Categorised Tabbed Inbox

This most recent effort by Google to help us organise our mail takes a different approach altogether, by filtering four types of not-so-important mail out of our Primary Inbox, and displaying it in tabs alongside. This enables us to review or act on it at our leisure, instead of having it clutter up our inboxes demanding to be dealt with when we are busy! In the same way as an automated feature flags our Important mail, the new Categories are assigned by an automated scan of our incoming mail.



How to turn it on
The new Tabbed inbox is turned on by choosing Default from the Inbox dropdown menu, and then by clicking the gear icon and choosing Configure Inbox. Here you turn the tabs you want to see on and off. If you turn a tab off, the mail that would have appeared there will instead be shown in your Primary Inbox.





The tabs are not user-configurable - they are pre-set to contain Social, Promotions, Updates and Forum messages, all of which can easily be identified by the automated scan, and the tabs cannot be altered.

How to use it


The tabs contain only the mail that is in your Inbox. Mail you have archived will not appear in tabs, but can be viewed when necessary using the Category labels in the sidebar.

By default, the category labels are brightly coloured for ease of recognition, although you can change the colours if you wish using the little dropdown menu that appears next to each label. You can also hide or show the labels in your sidebar label list and in your message lists (both hidden by default) using the same dropdown menu.







If Gmail gets a category wrong, there are three ways to put that right -

Drag the message out of the wrong tab and into the right tab



Right click the message and choose a different category



(Each time, you will be asked if all mail from that sender should now go to the new category.)

And thirdly, the Tabbed Inbox has its own newly added filter assignments, so you can also create a filter to always have messages which meet a certain criterion - e.g from:amazon.com - given a specific category label when they arrive.



As a bonus result of this new Inbox view, you also get a rightclick menu in all Inbox types that not only re-assigns categories where relevant, but allows you to delete or archive the message, or change its Read/Unread status without having to mouse up to the button bar.



As new mail arrives in the tabs, it will be flagged up briefly with a coloured tag, both on the tab and in the tab list, although this will go away once the tab has been viewed. There is no unread count for the tabs themselves - the unread count next to Inbox in the sidebar relates only to the Primary tab. The unread count for the whole category can, however, be seen next to the category label in the sidebar - and if you keep up to date with your mail and don’t archive categorised messages without reading them, those unread counts will generally reflect what is in your tabs in the Inbox.

How to turn it off and ignore it completely!
For those who do not want to use this Inbox view, and would prefer not to even know about categories, virtually everything can be turned off or hidden using Gmail’s built in options . The only place that you cannot hide the category labels easily are in the dropdown lists under the More and Label buttons, where unassigned category labels will appear at the end of the assignable labels list. (However, see below for a third party way to remove these!)

• To hide the sidebar labels - select Hide in Label list from each category label’s dropdown menu
• To hide the labels from your message lists, if you enabled them - choose Hide in Message list from each category label’s dropdown menu
• To remove all the tabs, click the gear, choose Configure Inbox and turn them all off.
• To turn off categorisation completely, create a filter to catch all your Incoming mail - a nonsense string like “poiuytrewq” in the Doesn’t Have box does that very reliably - and choose to have all your mail categorised as Personal. You can also apply the filter to remove the category labels from existing mail. That will put ALL your incoming mail into the single Default Inbox

And finally, for Firefox and Chrome users, to remove the last vestige of categories from even your Move and Label dropdown menus, Gmail user Mario Krušelj has discovered how you can add extra filters in the Adblock Plus browser extension to hide them completely. His solution is published in the Gmail Help Forum here: https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/MDWXUKCHrPw/agHnDvMQOTQJ

Firefox users need to install the Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus and Adblock Plus add-ons. Then go to ABP filter preferences, then select "Custom Filters" tab, followed by "Element Hiding Rules", then click "Add Filter". Now add the following eight filters:

mail.google.com##.J-N[title="Social"]
mail.google.com##.J-N[title="Promotions"]
mail.google.com##.J-N[title="Updates"]
mail.google.com##.J-N[title="Forums"]
mail.google.com##.J-LC[title="Social"]
mail.google.com##.J-LC[title="Promotions"]
mail.google.com##.J-LC[title="Updates"]
mail.google.com##.J-LC[title="Forums"]

For Chrome users, install the same two browser extensions. In the Options for the Element Hiding Extension, paste the above into User Filters box and click Save.

Adblock Plus and the Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper are available from www.adblockplus.org.

Summary and Useful Links

Each of these Inbox types is exclusive - you have to pick just one of them. Which is why it is worth experimenting to find the view that fits best with the way you work.

It’s not possible to mix and match tabs from the new categorised Inbox with sections from Multiple Inboxes, and you can’t use Unread First as well as the tabbed Inbox.

But once you have decided on the Inbox arrangement which is best for you, the abilities of Gmail to label, star, archive and generally help you organise your mail will enable you to get closer to “Inbox Zero” if that’s your ambition - or at least keep your mail under better control!

Inbox Styles & Settings: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186534?hl=en
Inbox Categories and Tabs: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3055016?hl=en
Inbox Categories and Tabs on your mobile: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499?hl=en
Multiple Inboxes videos: http://www.googlegooru.com/top-gmail-labs-multiple-inboxes/
http://www.techwithintent.com/2012/05/gmail-multiple-inboxes-keep-you-informed/
Priority Inbox: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531
Priority Inbox video: http://www.googlegooru.com/how-to-set-up-priority-inbox-in-gmail/
Organising your mail with labels, stars, etc:
http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/gmail-101.html?utm_source=BP_recent#organize1
Creating filters: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en
Creating and using labels: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708?hl=en
Archiving: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6576?hl=en
Deleting: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/32608?hl=en

Housekeeping your Google Accounts

OK - so there you are. You want to sign up for a new Google service, and when you visit the webpage for that service, it says "You need a Google account to use this service."

So what do you do?

You can, of course, create a new Google account there and then, to house your Blog, your Calendar, your YouTube Channel - whatever it is you are wanting to sign up to. But if you do that with every Google product you want to use, you will pretty soon build up an entire arsenal of different Google accounts, each with their own username and password, and each of which links to only one product you actually use. Confusing? You bet.

What's the alternative?

Do you already have a Google account? If you use any Google product at all - Gmail? YouTube? Blogger? Drive? Calendar? - then you already have a Google account, alive and kicking and ready to use.

If you do, and you would like to use your new Google product with that same Google account, then first, just sign in to the account with your usual username and password. Then revisit the new service you want to use. Go through any sign-up procedure required (sometimes none are required at all!) and that new service will seamlessly be added to your existing Google account.

That helps you to keep a single Google account for all your Google services, instead of having several independent Google accounts scattered all over the place, each with a different product attached to it.

How does this work?

Well, a Google account is more than just an "account". It's a kind of portal. The intention is to give you a single sign in - just one username and password - which then enables you to use the whole range of Google products to store, publish, share and manipulate all your information.

Try it - sign in to any of your Google accounts, and flip through the Apps in your App Switcher icon and the More menu. You'll find Google+, Maps, YouTube, Drive, Calendar - as you visit each one, you'll see if you look up to the upper right that you are actually already signed in to all of them, even if you haven't yet used them with this particular Google account.

So - having seen that you CAN use one Google account to sign in to all your Google products and services, what can you do tidy up all your existing accounts?

How to consolidate

Some products simply can't be moved to another account.

Gmail is one of those, because if you use Gmail with a Google account, it's the Gmail username and password that provides the unique identity for that Google account.

If you could move it in any automated way, then that Google account would lose its identity - so that's a no-no - but worse, the Gmail address would have to change when added to the account it was moving to - another no-no.

So unless you are prepared to sacrifice your existing Gmail address altogether, and set up a new Gmail address within another Google account which doesn't yet use Gmail (see below for how to do that), you can't shift your Gmail lock-stock-and-barrel to another account.

But many other products CAN be moved, or shared, or you can use some judicious export-import techniques to move the data manually.

For example, a Blogger account can be moved simply by changing the main "author". Add a new one, and then remove the original one. If your blog contains uploaded photos, you may need to move them too (see below) or leave the old account alive, even if otherwise unused.

For your photos uploaded directly or via Blogger to Picasa Web Albums (and viewable in Google+ as Photos) you can take advantage of a one-off migration service - and if you do that as well as moving your blog (see above), then you can eventually delete the original Blogger account, as the photos in the blog will also have moved to the new account.

A Calendar can be moved by exporting it from its original Google account as an ICS file and importing it into a new Google account. Or if you aren't deleting the original account, you can just share it with the new account.

Contacts can also easily be moved between accounts using the export-import route.

A YouTube channel can be sometimes be migrated to a new Google account - provided it was created prior to May 2009. If you don't have the migration option, you could choose to download your content and re-upload it to a new account - tedious if you have a lot of content, but useful as a last resort if you really want to delete the Google account that houses your YouTube channel.

Google Drive documents can be downloaded (and if you use Google Drive Sync, you already have the files stored on your computer) and uploaded to a fresh account. Or you can transfer ownership of documents you want to keep to another account.

If you have an AdSense account, you can also move that.

First make your plan

To help you plan your consolidation, and work out what you can migrate to where, there's a full rundown of what can be moved and what can't here:

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=58582

It's also a good idea while planning to visit the various Help Forums for each product and consult with the expert users who help out there, to ask advice and sometimes get very specific additional instructions.

And the Data Liberation Front website gives masses more information about "escaping" to and from multiple Google products and explains the Google Takeout service.

http://www.dataliberation.org/

https://www.google.com/takeout/

You may not be able to rationalise all the way down to one account - as some products simply can't be moved. But you can at least reduce the number of active accounts you need to use to access all your services - if nothing else, that's fewer usernames and passwords to remember!

Finally - housekeep!

Take it slowly, move one product at a time, exercise patience and accept the limitations - then your consolidation should rationalise your account usage and make your life a great deal easier in future!

----oooo000oooo----

NB - for a full and detailed explanation of the ins and outs of Google accounts, visit the first post in this blog here: Google Accounts - how they work

PS - moving Gmail data to a new Gmail account

So you've decided you want to get rid of an existing Gmail account - or perhaps more than one! - and create a new one inside another of your Google accounts. Or maybe you just want to consolidate several Gmail accounts into one, and delete the ones you no longer need.

Once you've created your new account under the umbrella of an existing Google account, or picked the existing account you want to make into your main Gmail account, you need to start transferring your Gmail data.

For your messages you can either use Mailfetcher - find that here:
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21288

Or if you are concerned to keep all your labels, you can use a backup/restore solution like Got Your Back - find that here: http://code.google.com/p/got-your-back/
Other backup/restore solutions are here: http://gmail-tips.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/gmail-backup.html

A third way to move your mail is to set up both old and new accounts in an email client like Thunderbird, using IMAP connections. When both accounts are synchronised with the client, you can copy your mail from the old account to the new account in small batches. Though I don't recommend you try this solution unless you are familiar with and comfortable using IMAP with email clients.

For your contacts, you need to export from the old account and import into the new account:
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=24911
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=14024

Filters can also be exported and imported: go to Settings/Filters to do that

* Gmail is a trademark of Google, Inc. This page is not sponsored by or affiliated with Google.

Wrong picture? Wrong name?

Mismatch errors between social profiles and contact records - how things go wrong with contact synchronisation across networks

Contents:

1 What goes wrong
2 How it happens
3 Common scenarios and how to fix them
4 Watch this space

What goes wrong

More people are connected over the net than ever before, and they want all their contacts available from everywhere, and kept up to date. So some service providers - Outlook.com being one example - now offer the option to search social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc, and pull contact information from those sites into your address book.

But the searches aren't perfect, and on some sites, people can (and do!) make errors in the e-mail address they use to set up their account. The result is that people can be linked to the Profile of a complete stranger, and when their friends pull that Profile data in from the social network, they will receive and store bad data in their address books. Although no outgoing email message can send profile information beyond a name and email address, the receiving account will match the email address on an incoming message to the stored name and photo in its address book and display it - right or wrong!

How it happens

Several social networks and services offer the ability to set up a public profile, including personal information and a photo. As networking increases, more people have multiple accounts with multiple services. There is now demand from users to sync all the information from all their social contacts together in one place - usually the on-line address book linked to their email account or their “People” app, when contacts are managed on a standalone basis..

Outlook (2010 onwards) has long had the ability to integrate users' contact lists with profiles from Facebook using a plug-in. But now Outlook.com - which incorporates Hotmail and Windows Live users as well - has this feature built in for both Facebook and Twitter and is publicising it. So take-up appears to be increasing.

Some cloud syncing services used on popular mobile devices are also offering linkages with social networks. There are numerous apps available for social linking.

Gmail users have a similar feature by default, linked to Google's own social network, Google+. Gmailers who have Google+ members listed in their Contacts will automatically see the public profile information and photo for a Google+ member in that person's contact record and alongside emails received from him.

The connection between an email contact and a public profile on a social network is made by using look-up features built into the social network to match registered email addresses with email addresses stored in people's address books.

Provided that the email addresses registered by social network members are correct, the system should work well. But if they are not, then people will find complete strangers linked to contact information in their email account address book and similar bizarre anomalies.

The Google+ system is pretty foolproof. In order to use a Google+ account and have a Google+ profile you first need to have a Google account. And in order to create or amend that Google+ profile, you must be signed in to the relevant Google account with the correct username and password. So, barring user error or account compromise, the details and photo in a Google account profile should remain correctly linked to the real owner of the email address used as its ID.

This is not the case with other social networks. For example, people can sign up to Facebook using any email address. Facebook will send an email to that address, but do not enforce verification. If the email is ignored, then the new account user is not restricted, and can use his account. Consequently it is possible for there to be glaring errors in the IDs of Facebook members when email addresses are looked up and profile information and photos synced with an email address book.

Common scenarios and how to fix them

Some people I email to are sent my Facebook profile photo! How dare Gmail invade my privacy like that?

Solution: Gmail doesn't "send" any photo out with your messages. The photo people see when they receive your message is the photo they have stored for you in their own contact list. If your recipients use any Microsoft email service, or a third party app for syncing social networks, they have probably synced their own contact lists with Facebook.

Therefore when they receive mail from you, the picture they have for you in their contacts is your Facebook picture, and that will appear beside your email when it arrives in their account. You have no control over that. The best you can do is go into your Facebook account and amend your privacy settings - you cannot opt out of the “look-up” service completely, but you can restrict who is allowed to do look-ups to your Friends only.

You could also investigate removing your Gmail address completely from your Facebook account, and substituting another - see their Help Page here:
http://goo.gl/YlZ6V

Some people I send mail to see a complete stranger's photo on my messages!

Solution: if your recipients use any Microsoft email service, or a third party app for syncing social networks, they have probably synced their own contact lists with Facebook - or perhaps another service which does not enforce verification. If someone signed up to Facebook using your Gmail address, their profile photo - and perhaps their name as well - has been matched to your address in your recipient's address book - so that’s the info your contact will see for you. And yes, it is perfectly possible for someone to sign up to Facebook using your Gmail address - it happens regularly, because Facebook does not verify user email addresses. You can contact Facebook to try to have the error corrected, but they may not act or respond. This could also happen with other social networks which do not verify registered email addresses.

People I send messages to see my wife's (friend's/partner's/sister's) name and Google+ photo on my mail!

Solution: your wife has amended or created "her" profile without realising she was signed into your account. Sign in to your account yourself and edit your profile to remove her details. And for the future, don't leave your own account signed on on a shared computer.

I set up a Gmail account for my friend, and now my YouTube account has his name and his photo on it!

Solution: Did you sign out of the non-Gmail Google account you use for YouTube FIRST? If not, then you have added his Gmail account to your own Google account and his details have become part of your account. To correct that, you will need to delete the Gmail account from your Google account. Your friend will need to start over with a different username, as his original one - though now deleted - is permanently linked as an "other username" to your Google account.

I said my room-mate could use my Hotmail address as his recovery address for his new Gmail account. Now my Gmail-user contacts see his picture!

Solution: Your room-mate added your Hotmail address to his account as an alternate address instead of a recovery address, and you verified the address without quite realising what the verification was for. An alternate address is an alternative ID for his account. So any Gmail user who has your Hotmail address in their contacts will now see your room-mate's Google profile linked to the Hotmail address. To correct that, tell him to remove your Hotmail address as an alternate ID on his account, and add it as a simple recovery address instead.

There is a complete stranger's picture showing on all my messages and my own contact entry

Solution: Not so much a solution in itself, but a initial path to finding a solution, is to drag that picture or cut and paste it into the Google Image Search search bar. That will pull up all web occurrences of the picture, so you can see which sites it is being used by. Once you know whether the photo is on Google+ or Facebook or some other site, it can be easier to track down how it has become connected to your email address.

When I posts comments on some blogs, the wrong picture comes up against my name - it's an old one I haven't used for ages

Solution: Did you ever set up a Gravatar account? If so, those websites - for example, Wordpress blogs - that can make use of it will pull the information and the photo from your Gravatar account, not from your Google account. So change the photo on your Gravatar account to the one you prefer to use.

Some of my contacts' names have been changed and are no longer their real names, but some kind of nickname or "handle", and their pictures seem different as well!

This has come about because some users have taken advantage of a change offered to a selection of people who operate YouTube Channels linked to their Google Profiles.

Ever since Google+ started, some users have wanted to use their well-established internet nicknames, by which they are widely known, rather than their real names. Now, some YouTube users who have linked their YouTube Channels to their Google+ Profiles - it's not a requirement, but many people choose to do that - have been offered the choice of using their YouTube Channel name as an alternative to their real name on those Profiles.

That means that their YouTube Channel name is now their master name across all Google products and services, and has replaced their real names on their Profiles.

So, if one of your Contacts is a YouTube Channel user, and has decided to change his Profile to reflect his YouTube name, he will now show in your Contacts list by that name instead of his real name. If he has changed his picture as well, then that new picture will also show up in your Contacts list.

Solution: Unfortunately for those who don't like these changes in their Contacts list, there isn't a way around it. Every email user everywhere can choose the name he wants other people to see when he sends email to them. Similarly, every Google user who creates a Profile chooses what he wants people to see as his name and picture. Other Gmail users have no control over this at all - if the email address linked to the Google Profile in question is in their Contacts, it will reflect the updated information.

So if you suddenly find that a glamorous-looking diva called Miss Purple has arrived in your Contact list where you used to have Mary Brown and a nice picture of her tabby cat, then that's Mary's choice and you have no real option but to respect that choice.

I clicked something on YouTube and now the name and picture on my emails has changed to my YouTube profile!

On the other side of the coin, if you are a YouTube user and you chose to take up this opportunity, you might not have realised that it would change your name and picture right across your entire Google account and all the products you use with it, including your Gmail account. You can, of course, change the name that goes out on your Gmail messages independently of your Profile, and also have a special Gmail picture, but your Contact hovercard will still reflect your Profile contents, which may have you thoroughly dismayed!

Solution: You can change back to your previous real name on your Profile by FIRST disconnecting your Google+ Profile from your YouTube Channel. Then go to your Profile and edit the name back to your correct real name - and change the picture back too, if you wish. That will restore your real name and picture to all your other Google products and services. If you then want to re-link your YouTube Channel to your newly edited Profile, and use your real name in YouTube, then you can.

You can do this by following the instructions in this link: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2657858.

Watch this space

There are many ways this baffling phenomenon can show up. All cause confusion and distrust among users, which is usually directed towards their own service provider rather than the true culprit. But it’s a given that until all social networks enforce verification of the email addresses people use to sign up for accounts, the problems caused by identity mismatching are likely to increase in number.

As more scenarios emerge, they will be added here, in the hope of providing an explanation and a route to a fix.

Gmail 101

All your Gmail basics in one place!

A primer for newcomers to Gmail, which explains how to find your way around Google's innovative email service and to perform the basic email tasks of reading messages, sending messages and organizing your mail using Gmail's web interface. It also explains how to create and maintain your address book, and take a few simple customization steps.

For more in-depth information on the many advanced features of Gmail, visit the Gmail Help Centre.

Contents:

Chapter 1: How to sign in to your new account
Chapter 2: Before you go any further
Chapter 3: What you see when you get there

• Inbox list - messages and their details
• Sidebar - Labels, Chat and Gadgets and how to switch between them
• Button bar - all the key actions in Gmail
• Search box - see Chapter 6
• Conversation view - how it works

Chapter 4: What to do when you get to your Inbox

• Reading Mail
• Sending new mail (using the new Compose features)
• Replying to mail (using the new Compose features)
• Forwarding mail (using the new Compose features)

Chapter 5: Organizing your mail

• Labelling
• Starring
• Archiving
• "Moving" your messages
• Deleting messages
• Using the Spam button

Chapter 6: Finding your mail
Chapter 7: Contacts

• Adding Contacts
• Contact Groups

Chapter 8: Customising Gmail

Chapter 1: How to sign in to your new account

This is the easy bit! All you need to is fire up your internet browser - Gmail works with the most recent two versions of all three mainstream browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome - make sure you are signed out of all other Google accounts and then type https://mail.google.com into the address bar. A sign in page will appear with boxes for you to type in your username and your password - fill the boxes and then click Sign In and you will be taken straight to your Gmail Inbox.

Chapter 2: Before you go any further

When you created your account, you were probably asked to give a mobile phone number or maybe another of your email addresses for verification purposes. These will have been stored in your Account Recovery settings, so that if anything goes wrong in future - e.g. you forget your password - you can easily regain access. So before you start using your account, make sure you have an email address in your Recovery options, and - preferably - a mobile phone number as well.

To do that, click your photo or email address in the top right of the Gmail window and choose Account to go to your Account settings page.

Scroll down to the box headed "Signing In", and click in turn on each of Recovery Email and Recovery Phone to set up your contact information.

Now you will always be able to quickly recover access if you forget your password or even your username! These settings can also be used by Gmail to create sign-in challenges when you first sign in from a strange location, when you might be asked to provide an extra security step, such as receiving a code by SMS to your mobile. As long as your recovery options are in place and up to date, you will have little difficulty in meeting any sign-in challenge.

Try this article for a complete run-down on account security and your recovery options: http://gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.co.uk/#security (When you reclaim Your Account).

Chapter 3: What you see when you get there

Inbox list
When you arrive in your Inbox, you’ll see a list of all your messages - including both new single messages and and new messages that have arrived in existing threads (called conversations in Gmail) - in date order (and no, you can’t sort the list any other way!) For each new unread addition to an existing conversation or a new single message you will see the name of the sender in bold, any label you might already have given it, the subject, a brief snippet from the latest unread message in the conversation, and the date/time it arrived. (Hover over the date/time to get full information about both.)

Sidebar - Labels, Chat and Gadgets and how to switch between them
In a brand new account, the lefthand sidebar is populated with the system labels - Gmail’s alternative to folders - some of which are collapsed under the More... item at the bottom of the list, and a Chat list, usually empty in a new account!  Newer accounts may have a Hangouts list rather than a Chat list - but the viewing options are the same for both.

NOTE: You will also see Circles, which is related to Google+ and can be ignored until you join Google+ and start building your circles of friends, colleagues and interesting people.

The space in the sidebar is divided between Labels and Chat - and it is divided dynamically. That means when you are working with labels, and have your mouse pointer in that part of the sidebar, your label list will have priority over the vertical space in the sidebar, but when you move your mouse pointer into Chat, Chat takes priority and will take as much space as it needs. The dividing line between the two moves up and down automatically. When even more space is required by either Labels or Chat, a vertical scrollbar will appear to enable them all to be viewed.

You can see this in the screen captures below - when the labels list is expanded by clicking on More..., it takes what space it needs and pushes Chat further down the sidebar.

You can control the spacing between Chat and Labels yourself to an extent by grabbing the dividing line and moving it up or down to suit how you use the sidebar most often. And if you don’t use Chat a great deal you can collapse it right out of your way, leaving all your space for labels, by clicking the little Chat bubble icon at the bottom of the sidebar - see below.

You can also swap the space used by Chat out to Gadgets - click the “ellipsis” icon to do that, and any gadgets you have installed will be displayed instead of your Chat list. They can be collapsed again by clicking the ellipsis. Any gadget you have installed will now be displayed in the sidebar instead of the Chat list.

To move labels that are hidden under More... further up, so that they are always displayed, grab each one with a left mouse click-and-hold and drag it up above the line.

To use the labels list, simply click on any of them to display the messages that have that label. Clicking on Trash, for example will show you the files you have deleted. Clicking Spam will show any Spam that has been caught by Gmail’s Spam filters, and clicking Inbox, of course, shows you your Inbox. For detailed information on how to use Gmail’s labels to handle your messages, see the Chapter called Managing your Mail below.

Button bar
You’ll also see a set of tools on the Gmail button bar - in list view you will see the Select button, the Refresh button and a More button with only one option on the left hand side, and on the right hand side of the bar you will see a message count, the Next and Previous buttons and the Gmail “gear” icon at the far right end.

The Select button offers a dropdown menu to select various kinds of messages, and if you click in the checkbox on the button itself it will select all messages on the page. The Refresh button refreshes your display. The gear icon gives you access to Gmail’s settings, themes and list density preferences. A recent addition is the option to Configure Inbox, which enables Gmail's new tabbed Inbox, although for the purposes of this guide, we are working in the normal single Inbox view of Gmail. See http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/organizing-your-gmail-inbox.html for full information about the tabbed Inbox and the other ways you can organise your messages.

This button bar will expand as soon as you select or open any messages, offering you extra options to Archive, Mark Spam, Delete, Move and Label the selected/open messages. You’ll find added options under the More button as well.

If you would prefer words on your buttons, rather than the standard icons, then click the gear icon and choose Settings. You'll land in the General tab - scroll down to find Button Labels and swap to words.

At any time, click the gear icon to get a dropdown menu for all the settings you will want to use in Gmail, and to access the Gmail Help Centre.

Search box
See Chapter 6 for more information about the search box and how it works

Conversation view
Before we go further, a word here about Gmail’s default conversation view.

If you send or receive a message with a particular subject, then Gmail will group future replies that have the same subject with the original message (incoming or outgoing) forming a conversation. Conversations are presented from the top down, oldest first, newest last, with those in between that you have already read collapsed away out of sight.

The intention is to make it easy for you to keep track of the flow of messages within a conversation by keeping them all together in one place

If you don’t like it, and would rather see all your messages separately - as in Outlook or any other email client - you can turn it off by clicking the gear icon and choosing Settings. Click the General tab and scroll to Conversations, and turn OFF Conversation View. Save Changes.

Chapter 4: What to do when you get to your Inbox

Reading mail
To read your mail, just click anywhere in the message row to open the relevant message/conversation in reading view. You’ll see the content of the message, and a brief header showing you who sent it and to whom. To find out a bit more, click the little downward pointing arrow to expand the header.

If there are pictures embedded in the body of the message, they may be hidden depending on what options you have selected in your Settings for the viewing of "external" images. If they are not visible, you can click the “Display Images” box in order to view those pictures.

If there are attachments at the end of the message, you will see them as thumbnails. To View most attachments in the Google Drive Viewer, just click the thumbnail.  When you hover over the thumbnail you will also see buttons to Download  a copy of the file to your computer’s hard disk, and Save to Drive, which will save a copy in your own Google Drive.

When you click the Download button:

• If you have a default Download folder set in your browser, the file will automatically be saved to that folder. If you don’t have a default Download folder set, you’ll see a Windows Save box pop up, so you can choose where to save the file.
• If you use Internet Explorer, IE will add an extra drop-down box when you click Download, offering to Open, Save or Save & Open the attachment. Beware of choosing Open - when you do that, IE downloads the message to a hidden temp folder. If you then edit the attachment and save it, you will save your edits to that hidden Temp folder, and the edited file will be almost impossible to find!

When you click the Save to Drive button, a box will pop up for you to choose which folder in your Google Drive you want to store the file in.
For lots more information about working with attachments, see Attachments in Gmail at http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/attachments-in-gmail-2013.html

Now you are in the message reading view, you can stay there and just move on to older or newer messages/conversations in your Inbox by clicking the Next/Previous arrows in the top right.

If you delete or archive messages or mark them as Spam whilst in reading view, you will be returned to your Inbox list.

• LAB TIP: To prevent this, you can enable the Auto Advance Lab in Settings/Labs. Which will move you to the Next or Previous message following delete, archive or mark as Spam, depending on how you set it up in Settings/General.

When you are done reading your mail and want to go back to your Inbox, either click Inbox in your sidebar, use the “back to Inbox” button or you can also click the Google logo in the top left to get back to your Inbox.

Sending new mail (using the new Compose features)
To create a new message, just click the big red Compose button at the top of your lefthand sidebar. The Compose box will pop up in the lower righthand corner of your Gmail window.

There is a full range of formatting tools:

and tools for inserting images, links, smileys etc.

To use the Compose box, add an address in the To: address box, pick and type a subject in the Subject area, and then type your message in the main box. When you are done, click Send.

To add an address to the To: box you have a number of options.
You can type it manually if it is a new address you haven’t sent mail to before.
OR
You can start typing it manually, and Gmail will offer you any matching contacts it finds in your Contacts, and you can click on the one you want to use.

OR
You can click on the word “To:” and have the Contact Picker pop up - where you can choose the Contacts you want to send your message to. Pick the ones you want, and click Select to have them entered in the address box for you.

If you want to use CC or BCC as well as To:, then click “CC” or “BCC” to call up the relevant address box first, and follow the same procedure as above to add a contact to that address box. You can move contacts around by dragging them if you change your mind.

• NOTE - when you have finished entering addresses, and move down to the message area, the Recipients area will collapse to just basic info, giving you more space in the box for typing. To see the full info again for amending or checking it just click in the box and it will expand again for you. .

If you want a signature to go out on all your mail, click the gear icon and go to Settings/General. Scroll down and set up your signature.

Save Changes. This will then be applied at the end of any message you send.

• TIP: f you want your signature to always appear right under the message you yourself are sending instead of at the very end of the message, including all quoted text, then go to Settings/General and check the box right under the signature panel, which will do that for you.

If you want to insert an image into the body of your message, you can drag any image file from your desktop or a Windows picture folder into the message box, and it will be inserted for you

OR
Hover over the plus sign at the bottom of the box and click the camera icon when it appears. That will show you a Windows file selector where you can navigate to your file and select it for insertion into the body of your message.

If you want to attach a file to your message - a Word doc or Excel file, for example - you can also drag and drop it to the message box in exactly the same way and it will be uploaded and attached to your message. To attach a picture rather than having it inserted, drag it down on to the paperclip icon to make sure it is attached and not inserted.

OR
You can click the paperclip icon at the bottom of the box to call up a Windows file selector so that you can select your file

If you want more space to write your message you can pop the Compose box out to its own window. To start Composing in a new window from scratch, use Shift-click on the Compose button, and if you’d prefer a whole new tab, use Ctrl-click.

For a full run-down on how the new Compose features work, check out this article:
http://gmail-tips.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/changes-to-gmail-compose.html

Replying to mail (using the new Compose features)
To reply to an email you have received, open it and click the Reply button in the top right, OR
Click Reply in the text box which appears at the bottom of the message.

If the original message you are replying to was sent to more than one person you will also see a Reply to All in the text box, and a Reply to All button will be available in the dropdown menu next to the Reply button.

When you click Reply, the name/s of the person/people you are replying to will be added for you automatically in the address box at the top, as will your own address as the sender. All the formatting and insertion tools are available as they are in Compose. All you need do to send an ordinary reply is type your message, and click Send

• NOTE: While Gmail always includes the text of the message you are replying to as quoted text, it is hidden by default when you start a reply. To reveal quoted text, click the little “ellipsis” icon to reveal it.

If you want to add other recipients for your reply, that were not included in the original message, then you can click in the address box and follow the procedure outlined above to add more To:, CC or BCC addresses.

If you want to insert pictures or attach files to your reply, follow the same instructions as for a new message above.

• NOTE:  When you reply to a message, any attachments that the original might have had are NOT sent back with the reply. If you really want to send them back, click the More icon in the lower right of the Compose box and choose that option. 

For a full run-down on how the new Compose features work, check out this article:
http://gmail-tips.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/changes-to-gmail-compose.html

Forwarding mail (using the new Compose features)
To forward messages you have received to another person, either use the Forwarding option from the drop down menu next to the Reply button

OR
In the text box at the end of the message, click the Forward link.
OR
Choose Reply anyway, and then select Forward from the drop down menu at the left hand side of the address box

To select addresses for forwarding, follow the instructions above for Sending and/or Replying
.
Type a covering note at the top of the forwarded message - or not, if that’s your choice - and click Send.

• NOTE: Any files attached to a message you are forwarding will be automatically forwarded to your recipients.

If you want to attach or insert additional files, then follow the instructions for attaching and inserting above.

For a full run-down on how the new Compose features work, check out this article:
http://gmail-tips.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/changes-to-gmail-compose.html

Chapter 5: Organizing your mail

Labelling
For a comprehensive overview of how Gmail uses labels to manage your mail, please first read this article: http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/how-gmail-stores-your-mail.html

To create a new label, either go to Settings/Labels and choose Create New Label
OR
In your sidebar, at the bottom of your labels list, click More and then choose Create New Label

OR
Select the message you want to give the new label to, by clicking in its checkbox in the message list, choose the Labels button from your top button bar, and again choose Create New Label

Once you have created a label, you can give it a colour to make it stand out from other labels. Put your mouse pointer on the label in the sidebar and you’ll see a little Options menu dropdown arrow on its right. Click there to choose your colours - you can also make decisions there about where you want the label to show up.

To apply a label to a message, open or select the message by clicking its checkbox, and click the Labels button. Check the label - or if you wish, multiple labels - that you want in the dropdown labels menu to apply it to that message/conversation.

• NOTE: A Gmail message can have several labels, so it’s always easy to find it. For example, a message from your brother asking about bookings for your vacation can be labelled as Vacation, Bookings and Family - so you’ll find it if you click on any of those labels in your sidebar.

OR
Find the label in your sidebar, then left click-and-hold and drag it into either an open message or the relevant message in your message list

.

To view all the messages/conversations which have had a certain label applied to them, click that label name in your lefthand sidebar. That will give you a set of search results for that label. You can do this with your own labels and with any of the “system” labels like Sent Mail, Important or Starred, etc.

• NOTE: Unlike other email systems and clients, what you see when you click a label is NOT a “folder” full of duplicates, even when you can see the same messages/conversations in your Inbox or if you click any other label.
  The list is just a “view” - a set of search results - of the messages stored in your account that have a specific label. If you delete a message or conversation from this “view” you will delete the only copy stored in your account. It’s particularly important to remember this when looking at your Sent Mail label.
  Again, see the article here for an explanation in more detail:
  http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/how-gmail-stores-your-mail.html

Starring
In addition to labels, Gmail offers stars. The default is a yellow star, which you can select by clicking the star outline in your message lists.

But there are several more that you can enable in your Settings/General page, and once you’ve done that subsequent clicks will cycle through all those you have enabled, in whatever order you chose.

Archiving
“Archiving” in Gmail has one very specific meaning: it simply means “Remove this message from my Inbox” - and that is all it does.

It does not move a message, it doesn’t file it away somewhere different. It simply removes the Inbox label, so that you do not see that message any more when you click Inbox in your sidebar.

If you want to see it in future, look in All Mail. If you labelled it before archiving it, then click the label name in your sidebar.

“Moving” your messages
Moving is a bit of a misnomer - if you read the article at http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/how-gmail-stores-your-mail.html you will see that Gmail consists of one large mailbox containing all your mail plus Spam and Trash. So in fact there is nowhere in GMail for you to “move” a message to!

When you “Move” a message or conversation from any defined Gmail view (i.e. any label view or your Inbox), all you do is remove the label belonging to that view and give it a new one. It’s still there in All Mail - just as it has been all along - it simply has a different label, and so will show up when you click that new label, rather than when you click the old label it had before.

• e.g. if a message is in the Inbox and you click Move, and apply a new label, then you will not see that message any more if you click Inbox - but you will see it if you click the new label you just applied.

To “move” a message that is in the Inbox, select it in your message list, click Move in the button bar, and choose the new label you want it to have.

The Inbox label will be removed, and your new label applied.

If you have already labelled a message and now want to change its label, click the original label in your sidebar to see the messages that have that label, then select the message and click Move. Choose the new label you want that message to have from the dropdown box - the old one will be removed and the new one added..
OR
You can use Drag and Drop - click on the original label name in your sidebar, locate the message, and then use the little “grabbie” hand that appears when you put your mouse pointer between the checkbox and the star selector and drag it to the new label you want it to have in the sidebar.

OR
You can do it manually - locate and select the message, and then click the Labels button. Uncheck the labels you no longer want, and check the new labels you do want. Click Apply.

Deleting Messages
Gmail always used to recommend never deleting mail, as the space allocated to you for message storage is so large - all you needed to do was archive. But people now use email differently, and there are far more space-hogging inserted pictures, videos and other big attachments flying around the internet mail system than before, so deleting mail you really do not want and will never look at again makes sense.

To delete a message or a conversation, select it and click the Trash button in the button bar. That will send it to Trash (or the Bin, depending on where you live!) where it will sit for 30 days before Gmail automatically deletes it forever from your account.

To delete one message from within a conversation without deleting the whole conversation, open the specific message concerned, click the dropdown next to the Reply button, and choose “Delete this message”.

All the while your deleted mail is in Trash you can recover it by selecting it and then clicking Move To and selecting Inbox - so it’s easy to put right any mistakes you might make, or change your mind about deleting a message and put it back into your Inbox or even give it a label and archive it instead.

You CAN empty Trash if you wish - click Trash in your sidebar and click the link “Empty Trash Now” at the top of the message list.

But unless you are getting dangerously close to filling your 10 Gb account space right up, it really isn’t advisable. Because once you empty Trash, your 30 day safety net for your deleted messages is gone for good - messages you have deleted from Trash cannot be recovered and are gone forever.

Using the Spam button
New accounts won’t receive much Spam, but after a while, if you use your Gmail address out there on the web, the spammers will “harvest” that address from other sites and will add you to their lists, and you’ll start receiving junk mail.

Gmail’s built-in Spam filter is one of the best in the business, and will divert most Spam out of your Inbox and into Spam, where it will sit (like Trash does) for 30 days before being automatically deleted from your account. All you need to do yourself is check Spam occasionally to make sure Gmail isn’t making any mistakes and isn’t sending “good” messages to Spam.

If you find a “good” message in Spam, select it and click the Not Spam button in your button bar. The Spam filter will take note of your preference and return the message to your Inbox.  You may have to repeat the action more than once, but the filters are usually quick to react, and messages from that sender should not be sent to Spam in future.

If you find a Spam message in your Inbox, select the message and use the Spam button in your button bar to send the message to Spam. Again, the Spam filter will take note of your preferences, and mail from that source will stop appearing in your Inbox after a short while. You may find you need to use the Spam button more than once, but if you are persistent, the filters will catch on!

Again, like Trash, you can empty Spam if you wish by selecting the link at the top of the message list - but it will all be deleted anyway after 30 days on a rolling basis. And like Trash, messages deleted from Spam can not be recovered.

Chapter 6: Finding your mail

As we said right back at the beginning, you can’t sort your Inbox - by default, your mail appears in date order, newest at the top. But GMail’s search is fast and efficient, and can find just about anything you want.

There is a comprehensive list of all the search terms you can use right here in Gmail Help, but here are a few of those you will want to use most often:

• Subject - find any subject by typing “subject:your keyword” into the search box and clicking the blue search button
• Sender - find any sender by typing “from:sender’s name or address” in the search box - Gmail will search your contacts when you use “from:” in the search box, and offer you matching suggestions that you can pick from before clicking the blue button. A quicker way to find all mail from a sender is to use the hovercard - if you can see his/her name in your message list, hover over it, and when the hovercard pops up, click EMails
• Any word in the message - type the word into the search box and click the blue button. This can also search text in many common types of attached files, so if you remember receiving a Word document from a friend that contained a recipe for “pumpkin pies”, Gmail should find the recipe for you!
• Messages from a specific period - type “before:yyyy/mm/dd after:yyyy/mm/dd” into the search box, and Gmail will return messages sent and received between those two dates
• To find messages you have not yet read, enter “is:unread” into the search box and Gmail will find all your unread mail. If you want to restrict the search to your Inbox, use “in:inbox is:unread” instead.

You can even use Boolean search terms in Gmail search - AND is implicit if you enter two search terms; OR can be entered (in caps) between search terms, and NOT can be entered simply by putting a minus sign in front of the item you do not want to be found.

That allows search terms to be combined for very effective searches - for example, “before:2012/06/01 from:David -football” will find messages from David sent to you before 1st June this year that were not about football.

The search box searches Gmail by default, but you can also use it to search the web - you’ll see the option offered to you in the autocomplete dropdown box if your keywords are relevant for a web search.

• LAB TIP: If you regularly use certain searches and don’t want to type them out every time, you can enable the Quicklinks lab in Settings/Labs, which will put a Gadget in your sidebar allowing you to save the search and then re-use it with a single click.

Chapter 7: Contacts

Contacts is the address book for your account. You access it in Gmail using the Gmail Contact Manager, which you reach by clicking on “Gmail” at top of your sidebar to show the main menu.

When you first go to Contacts, you will see a list in the left hand sidebar containing your two main contact Groups: My Contacts and Other Contacts.

Most Contacted is a default Group, and simply shows the 20 people you have most often sent mail to in the past. There are also links to create a New Group or Import Contacts.

Like all Google products, contacts also has a search box, where you can find any contact you have entered by entering any of its details as keywords in the search bar and hitting the blue button.

NOTE: You will also see Circles, which is related to Google+ and can be ignored until you join Google+ and start building your circles of friends, colleagues and interesting people.

Adding contacts
Auto-add - Gmail auto-adds by default the address of everyone you send an email message to who isn’t already in your Contacts. The new addresses are added to a special category called Other Contacts, which means you can choose whether to keep them or not. The intention is that you should occasionally check your Other Contacts, delete the one-offs that you won’t use again, and transfer those you want to keep to My Contacts.
Manual add using the Hovercard - when you put your mouse pointer over a sender’s name, a hovercard with their details will pop up. If that sender is not already in your Contacts, you will see the option to “Add to Contacts” which will take you into the Contact Manager to a Contact entry card pre-populated with the address so that you can add other details.

Manual add using Reply Dropdown menu item - you can also open a message, and in the dropdown menu next to the Reply button, you’ll see “Add xxxx to Contacts list” if that person isn’t already in your Contacts. Click the option and the address will be stored in My Contacts, but this option doesn’t offer you a Contact entry card.

Manual add using Contact Manager - to add Contacts yourself, manually, switch to Contacts, and click the New Contact button at the top of the sidebar to get a new blank Contact entry card to fill in. Gmail saves automatically as you make changes, but you can also click the Save button.

Importing - if you have names and addresses saved in another account, saved in an email client or just stored in a spreadsheet and you’d like to have them in your Gmail Contacts, you can import them.

• First export them from your other account or client as a comma separated variable (CSV) file, following the instructions they provide. Or - if you are using a spreadsheet - re-save your sheet as a CSV file.
• Open the file in a spreadsheet. Make sure the column headings (field names) are likely to work with Gmail. For example, although Gmail can understand a range of different field names, the names it uses itself are:

                    Given name (i.e. first name)
                    Family Name (i.e. last name)
                    E-mail (i.e. email address)

• Then switch to Contacts in Gmail, click the Import Contacts in the sidebar
  OR
  Click the More button and choose Import from there.
• Gmail will give you a file selector box to choose your saved import file. Navigate to it, and click Open. Then click the Import button.
• Your contacts will import into My Contacts, and will also be available in their own special Group in the sidebar called “Imported...” + the import date

Contact Groups
Contact Groups are a little like labels and work in some similar ways. Just as message labels let you see a single message stored in All Mail in lots of different ways, so do groups allow you to tag a single contact according to the different ways you use that contact. In Contacts, the equivalent of All Mail for messages is My Contacts plus Other Contacts. For example, your friend Joe is listed in My Contacts, but you can also add him to - for example - Friends, Football and Sports Club Groups - his entry in My Contacts will be tagged with those Group names, and when you choose to send mail to one of those Groups his address will be pulled out of My Contacts and put in the address box.

How to build Groups - first create your New Group name by clicking on New Group in the sidebar. Give it a name and you will see it appear nested under My Contacts in your sidebar.

Then go through your contacts one by one, select them and add them to the new Group using the Groups button. It’s very similar to adding Labels to your messages - in Gmail you select messages and apply the Label. In Contacts, you select contacts and add the Group name.

So why use Groups? Groups let you quickly add many addresses to the To:, CC: or BCC: boxes in Gmail all at the same time. For example: if you run a PTA, you can put all your PTA parents into a PTA Group. Then to send mail to all of them, you just open a Compose box in Gmail and start typing PTA into any address box - To:, CC: or BCC: - Gmail will find the Group in Contacts and offer it to you as a suggestion in a dropdown box. Click the suggestion, and all the parents’ addresses will expand automatically into the box so that the message is sent to all of them.
OR
You can click on To: to get the contact picker, select the group, and choose all members.

Gmail has one neat extra feature linked to Groups. If your friend James is a PTA member and a Sports Club member, and has two different email addresses listed in his Contact entry card, you can choose which address to use for which Group, or whether to send to both. Open James’s Contact card, and you will see the Group names listed at the top, each with a dropdown arrow. Click the arrow and check off which of James’s email addresses you want used when you send mail to that Group - check them both to send to both.

Chapter 8: Customising Gmail

Gmail’s default interface is clean and uncluttered, with little colour other than your key buttons. There is not a great deal you can control about what appears on your screen, other than in small ways.

One of those small ways is the vertical density of the messages in your lists and other screen elements - find those settings directly under under the gear icon. You can choose from Comfortable - wide spacing, Cozy - medium spacing, or Compact - narrow spacing.  But bear in mind that Gmail is "scaleable" - i.e. if you have a widely spaced setting chosen, and you reduce the size of your browser window, or change computers to one with a smaller screen, Gmail will drop down to less widely spaced settings, according to the screen real-estate available.

If you don't want the advertisement/information strip at the top of your Inbox listing, you can turn that off by going to Settings/Webclips and disabling it.

You can also choose whether to use the default icons on all your buttons or to use words - switch to words by choosing that option in Settings/General (see Chapter 3).

To personalise your page, try Gmail’s Themes, which you’ll find directly under the gear icon. Here are just a few of them:

There is a range of solid colour themes to choose from, some high quality graphic images, and other “classic” Gmail themes, many of which change each day, or according to the weather, or even according to the time of day. There are also two “custom themes” which offer the choice of a light or dark message list background, and allow you to choose from a huge range of Picasa-hosted gallery images, or if you prefer, you can choose or upload one of your own favourite pictures.

Here’s how your Gmail page can look with just the built in customisation tools.

If you are more adventurous you can try some of the suggestions in these two articles:

http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/userstyles-for-gmail.html

http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/beyond-gmails-themes.html

NB - This article tries to keep pace with the changes in Gmail, and was last updated on 12 December 2013


* Gmail is a trademark of Google, Inc. This page is not sponsored by or affiliated with Google.