Gmail Podcast

Category: White Belt

Gmail tips for the beginner.

  • 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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  • 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.

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    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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  • Not Spam

    One of the main reasons I, and many others, love Gmail is for its excellent spam filtering capabilities. Spam is a term used for those annoying advertisements typically regarding your health or finance. In some cases this content can be as high as 90% of your email traffic. Gmail does a pretty good job at automatically recognizing this type of content and moves from your inbox to a separate location labeled “Spam”. However, nothing is foolproof and every once in a while a conversation ends up in the spam folder by mistake.

    Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to retrieve the email and identify it as a valid message; at the same time have Gmail learn not to make the mistake again. By clicking the Spam link on the left you will be shown all the conversations that have been identified as questionable content.

    At the top of the conversation index, you’ll see a couple buttons. The first is labeled “Delete forever”. This moves any selected conversations to the Trash folder. After 30 days they are completely removed from the system.

    The second button is labeled “Not Spam”. By selecting one or more conversations and then clicking “Not Spam”, the content will be moved back to your Inbox and Gmail will learn not to make the same mistake.

    If you are Gmail search savvy, there’s a catch to this. First, click on the Spam link on the left and take a look at the search box at the top of the screen. See how it says “in:spam”? As of this writing there is a minor bug in Gmail. If you type the search “in:spam” manually, you will be brought to a standard search results screen which does not have a “Not Spam” button. Ironically, you are now looking at all the mail that has been tagged as spam, but you still have the option to report it as spam with the “Report Spam” button. Hopefully Google will correct this oversight at some point.

    Here’s today’s quick tip: If you have used the Gmail contacts to create groups of people, you can type the group name and address multiple recipients with one single label. For example, if I want to send my entire family an email, and I have created a group called “Tomasi family”, I can compose a new message and use the address “Tomasi family” in the To, Cc, or Bcc line for quicker addressing.

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  • Odds and Ends

    Google has been very busy lately adding some very nice features to their version 2.0 interface. As a reminder, the ver 2.0 interface requires IE 6 or later or FireFox 2.0 or later.

    if you haven’t been following the blog on the Gmail Podcast website I’ll bring you up to date on a few announcements from Gmail in the past few weeks.

    At first glance, the feature of colored labels doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the most I use it, the more I like it. If you look at your labels on the left, you should see very light squares next to each of the labels. By clicking one of these squares you can set a color for that label. Now when you glance at your conversation index, the colors really stand out to help identify groupings of messages.

    As a side note, I also noticed while reading a conversation, the labels at the top of the message have a little “x” next to them. If you click on the “x” you remove that label from the conversation. If you click on the “x” next to the Inbox label, you archive the message. That’s a lot quicker than pulling down the “More Actions” list and going to the bottom to remove a label.

    Another new feature that will make you GoogleTalk users happy is that Gmail now allows you to import your AOL IM buddies directly in to GTalk. And yes, the chat transcripts from AIM conversations are saved to your email archive like the native GTalk conversations.

    The final addition in the past few weeks is the use of a very useful keyboard shortcuts help screen. Besides the cool factor of transparency, being able to reference the help screen at any point. There is a lot of information on that screen so I suggest picking one or two keyboard shortcuts, get used to using them and then go get a couple more. One of my recent favorites is the “.” key that triggers the “More Actions” drop list. Now I can label messages with just a few keystrokes.

    Something tells me we can look for plenty more new little features like this in the future. Google has proven that it continues to innovate and add to their product. Keep your eyes on the Gmail Podcast website and listening to the Gmail Podcast for more information.

    Quick Tip: How to unmute a conversation. If you mute a conversation and then later decide you want to unmute it, you can use the “Unmute” link at the top. However, you may decide days or weeks later that you want to follow that subject again. This is a simple matter of finding the conversation and moving it back to the inbox. You can find all muted messages by searching using the keyword “is:muted”. Click on the conversation you want, then use the “More Actions” pull down – the first option is “Move to inbox”. This effectively, un-archives the message and continues to present it in your inbox and track it like any other conversation.

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  • Archiving

    I was surprised to find that I had not covered this topic yet.

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  • Report Phishing

    Tired of those nasty messages from bogus sources impersonating sites PayPal, eBay, or your bank in order to gain access to your information? Gmail has a feature to help combat this situation. It only takes a couple mouse clicks to help you and your fellow Gmail users. Listen and learn how.

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  • Importing Contacts

    Find out how to get lots of contacts from your old system in to Gmail using comma separated value (CSV) files. Whether you are using a system like Microsoft Outlook or just want to save time entering data through the web interface by means of a spreadsheet, this one can really save you time.

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  • Reply by Chat

    Learn how to use another new feature of Gmail. Reply by Chat allows you to use the subject of an existing message or conversation and start a chat with the sender. By using Reply by Chat, the chat transcript is saved (if the feature is turned on in your profile) and kept with the rest of the conversation. Very handy!

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  • CC and BCC

    Learn the power of sending email to others without disclosing their identity to some. The CC (Carbon Copy) field and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field in Gmail can be very useful at times.

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  • Signatures

    Episode #12: Signatures

    Learn how to automatically put a signature or tag line on each message. I also provide some tips for good signature etiquette.

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