Gmail Podcast

Category: Gmail Blog

  • Hosted Email – latest details

    Hey Gmail-ers. Just a quick update on the hosted email instructions. It seems every time I go to host email from one of my domains, the procedure changes a bit. The toughest part was getting started with the FREE hosting. Here’s the first few critical steps to help get you started.

    • Go to http://www.google.com/a
    • Click on the blue button “See details and sign up”.
    • Now, look for the link just under the blue “Start Free Trial” labeled “Standard Edition”. This is the free one.
    • Click the blue “Get Started” button

    The rest of the steps are pretty much the same as before and walk you through on the screen. If you have questions or problems drop me an email gpodcast at gmail dot com.

  • Are You A Gmail Ninja?

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    After three and a half years of doing the Gmail Podcast, the features of this web application are really starting to add up. Some are fairly simple and some are more complex. This past week, Google posted their collection of features to teach you to become a Gmail Ninja. I’ll post a link on the Gmail Podcast web page.

    The tips are organized in to categories according to rank. For example, a Gmail white belt gets a few messages a day and uses stars to indicate special conversations, uses labels to organize messages, perhaps spices up their environment by applying a theme, and archives instead of deleting.

    A green belt might use video chat, use tasks, create filters to further organize email, preview attachments without downloading them, avoid email gaffes with the Undo Send labs feature, use the Google Chat status to tell their friends what they are up to, and use the vacation responder to let people know when they are away.

    A Gmail black belt, uses more advanced features like keyboard shortcuts to navigate quickly through the interface, use more advanced search operators, use the plus sign to create personalized email addresses for later filtering, use Gmail offline, use canned responses, and “EOM” in the subject to avoid the warning message of having no text in the body of a message.

    And finally, the highest level of Gmail Ninja is the Gmail Master. A master does things like bring Google Docs and Calendar in to Gmail using the sidebar widgets, knows how to sign out of another computer remotely, personalizes their own web clips, always uses https to access their email securely, and hosts their own domain email using Gmail.

    Which level of Gmail Ninja are you? If you’ve been listening to the Gmail Podcast for a while, my guess is you are a black belt or master. If not, keep listening or go back in the archives to get specific instructions on these, and other, great tips.

    Tip:

    Here’s today’s quick tip. Use the Gmail Labs feature “Send and Archive” to add a button to the bottom of the message compose screen that lets you send your response, and archive the conversation in one step. You can add this feature from the Labs tab in the Settings screen – use this and you’ll be one step closer to being a black belt Gmail Ninja.

    Finally, I have one commentary on a recent feature added to Gmail. I love the features that Google has provided in the Gmail application, both desktop and mobile. This past week, they tweaked the mobile application, as I said they were likely to do in the last Gmail Podcast, to include a finger swipe motion from left to right or right to left at the conversation index that brings up an archive button. I tried this a couple times, but realized it was one of those features that just isn’t for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPod Touch and use finger motions all the time. In fact, I can’t live without them. This particular addtion to the Gmail interface seems like it was done just to see if they could do it. You see, if you use the checkbox for a message, the floating button bar comes up immediately allowing you to archive, delete, or other actions. Is a finger swipe and a button push any faster than two finger taps? I’m not sure. What I am sure is that I often operate on multiple messages, in which case, the finger swipe to archive five messages is much slower (a total of 10 finger motions) than tapping the checkbox five times and hitting the archive button (6 finger motions). Am I being picky? Perhaps. Use what you feel is more comfortable. I’m just offering my opinion about a feature that doesn’t add any value to me. Maybe this is a sign that Google will be adding more finger motions to the interface in the future.

    Link to the Gmail Ninja page: http://www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html#master

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  • iPhone and Android Enhancements

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    If you’re an iPhone or Android user, you’ll definitely want to look at the recent changes to the mobile web Gmail interface for those devices. Google has made some major improvements to the UI.

    First, Gmail mobile now supports labels for your email conversations very much like the desktop version. Now you can add color coded tags to respective emails for managing your inbox while you’re on the go. You can find the Label feature in the new “floating menu bar”, as I call it, that also has buttons labeled “Archive”, “Delete”, and “More”. Click on “More” and select “Label As” just below “Mute”.

    Another new addition is address auto completion of recipients’ names. Now you can simply start typing a name and Gmail will start filling in the name for you.

    Finally, my favorite – keyboard shortcuts. Yes, now you can use keyboard shortcuts if you own an Android phone. Most of the same keyboard shortcuts map the same way they do on the desktop. From the official Gmail blog at Google, “if you’re reading an e-mail you can press ‘u’ to return to the inbox or ‘n’ to move to the next conversation.”

    Interestingly, these changes to the iPhone and Adroid platform came at the same time in April 2009 when they completely redesigned their mobile application. This is a change from previous enhancements which came out on the larger target audience of the iPhone first.
    This new Gmail interface is available for iPhone/iPod Touch with OS 2.2.1 versions and Android-powered devices in U.S. English language only.

    Look for more nice tweaks to the mobile version of Gmail in the future and keep listening to the Gmail Podcast to stay up to date on them.

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  • Import Mail and Contacts

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    Gmail is rolling out a feature that will allow you to migrate your email and contacts from other email providers including Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and many others.

    For years, you’ve heard me – and probably dozens of other people – preaching the virtues of Gmail. To some of us, it practically IS a religion. We want people to convert and Google understood the downfalls of changing from one email service to another. It can be painful to switch all your contacts using some clumsy export and import using a CSV file. No only that, what do you do with all your legacy email?

    Now Gmail makes it much easier to make the transition. This feature is enabled for all new accounts and is being slowly deployed to all existing accounts. Unfortunately, businesses and schools using Google Apps won’t have this feature available to them any time soon.You’ll know you have it if you go in to Settings and you find a tab labeled “Accounts and Imports”, formerly just labeled “Accounts”.

    There you will find a section with a button labeled “Import Mail and Contacts”. Click that and you’ll see choices to import contacts and mail immediately, continue importing email for the next 30 days, allowing you to take Gmail for a test drive, and even apply a Gmail label to all imported mail to quickly identify it as information from your other account.

    If you don’t have the option, or prefer doing things the more traditional way, you can still use POP3 mail fetching or CSV export and import to retrieve your old information.

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  • Undo Send

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    You’ve just worked a 40 hour day and your brain isn’t functioning at 100%. You’re tired and stressed that the project is behind schedule because of someone not ordering the right part. You write up a quick email and think you’ve got the attachment for the correct order, only to find you forgot the attachment right after you hit the send key.

    How about this one; you’ve spent hours setting up a surprise party for your co-worker. You’ve got everyone in the recipient list and click the Send key only to discover in your haste that you included the birthday boy in the list. Yes, a similar situation has happened to me. Don’t you wish you could undo that send?

    It is for situations like this that I highly recommend you try the Gmail Labs feature Undo Send. This feature can save you from embarassment, incomplete thoughts, or even a career ending email.

    Just turn on Undo Send like you do any other Labs feature under the Settings link and click the “Gmail Labs” feature. Locate “Undo Send”, click enable to the right, scroll to the bottom, and click “Save Changes”.

    Now when you send an email, you’ll have an Undo link appear allowing you to grab that message before it gets sent and take you back to the compose screen.

    Sadly, the feature cannot pull back an email once it has already been sent, it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the proverbial panic button. For some reason, if you close Gmail or your browser crashes, the message will still get sent.

    I have it turned on and used it several times. If I ever put together a top 10 list of Labs features to enable, this one is definitely on that list.

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  • Improved Search

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    Let’s face it, few of us take full advantage of the full power of the Gmail search feature. We look for a keyword or email address and perhaps we add “has:attachment” if we know the message included a picture or something. If done properly, the search would look like “chuck.tomasi@gmail.com filename:(jpg OR png)”. I’m sorry, that’s a little too geeky.

    Fortunately, Gmail Labs includes a feature that can speed up and simplify the search process. It’s called “Search Autocomplete”. Turn it on by going to Labs under Gmail settings. Now as you type in the search box, Gmail will provide suggestions as you type. The nice thing about this is Gmail also provides the “geeky” way of doing the search.

    Let’s take the example above. I start typing “Chuck Tomasi” and Gmail provides my address. Now I just type “photos” or “pictures”, select “has photos” from the drop down list and the search query automatically inserts (filename:(jpg OR png)). Similarly, you can type in the word “attachment” and Search Autocomplete will list the most common attachment types for you.

    Gmail includes the geeky query for you so you can tweak it as necessary. Say you want to include GIF image types to your photo search. Just manually change it to “filename:(jpg OR png OR gif)”.

    Personally, I think Search Autocomplete should be on by default because it really cleans up the search process. You’ll save so much time you can send me a note writing a quick review for this podcast on the iTunes Music Store.

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  • Sender’s Time Zone

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    OK, here’s a situation. You sit down to read your email from a friend who lives in England. The email has a few questions that really need to be responded to over a phone call. Unfortunately, you cannot remember what time it is in England and you don’t want to wake them up at an unreasonable hour.

    That’s where the Gmail Labs feature called “Sender Time Zone” comes in handy. To use the feature, click on the Gmail Settings link in the upper right corner of the screen, then locate and click on the Labs tab. Locate “Sender Time Zone” and click “Enable” next to it then scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes”.

    Now Gmail takes a peek at the sender’s timezone in the message header and conveniently places a green phone icon next to the people if their local time is between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM and a red icon if the person is outside that time range. If there is no timezone in the message header, no icon is displayed.

    If you click on the “Show Details” link, Gmail will display the time zone information that it uses as well as the current time of the sender.

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  • Suggest More Recipients

    One of the handiest labs features I have found is called “Suggest more recipients”. Like other labs features, you can enable this by going to the Settings link in the upper right, clicking on the labs tab, then locate the feature called “Suggest more recipients”, scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes”.

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    Once you have enabled the feature, begin by entering at least two names in the “to”, “cc”, or “bcc” boxes, Gmail will add a link labeled “Also include”. Gmail scans previous messages you have sent and received in groups and provides those email addresses as suggestions. Now when you find yourself communicating with the same three or four people over and over, Gmail will find those names for you and you can simply click on them to ensure you haven’t forgotten anyone.

    Tip: Gmail Podcast – Title Tweaks

    Begin by enabling the lab feature. This labs feature changes order of elements in the browser title bar from “Gmail – Inbox (20) – chuck.tomasi@gmail.com” to “Inbox (20) – chuck.tomasi@gmail.com – Gmail”. This way you are able (most of the time) to see if a new mail has arrived even if Gmail window is minimized.

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  • Insert Images

    It is no longer necessary to use workarounds to put images in your messages or attach them. There is now a labs feature that allows you to insert images as easily as your favorite word processor.

    This episode of Gmail Podcast is sponsored by GotoMyPC.com – get a free 30 day trial!

    Begin by going to Settings and click on the Labs tab. Search for the feature called “Inserting images” and click “enable” next to it then scroll to the bottom and save your settings. Now when you are composing a message, you should see a toolbar icon like this:

    gmail-insert-images-icon
    You’ll want to make sure you are in Rich Formatting mode or the icon won’t show up. If you don’t see it, look for a link that says “Rich Formatting”.

    Once setup, just click on the little image icon and you can insert images in a couple different ways. First you can upload an image from your computer, or you can provide a web URL to a specific image.

    To protect you from spammers, Gmail does not display URL based images in messages by default. If you are missing images, you’ll need to click on the link near the top that says “Display images below” or “Always dislay images from…” to see images you embed.

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  • Google Searches from within Gmail

    Gmail has had a search feature for a while to allow you to search your mail, but until now, there wasn’t a convenient way to search the internet from within Gmail. Many times I’ve been asked in an email or chat for something and had to jump to Google to find the answer. Rather than open a tab, search the web, copy and paste my answer in to a response, Google has made this much easier with the addition of a Labs feature aptly called “Google Search”.

    Adam de Boor, Software Engineer, explains, “When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox. Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results. You can click on a search result and it’ll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it’s what you’re looking for. Once you’re sure it’s a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.“

    What’s more, it remembers the last three searches you did. You can even launch multiple searches and have more than one pop-up window at a time. This is sure to be one of my more used labs features.