Now that you’re using gmail, do you ever find yourself writing a message, but needing information from a previous message or from your Contacts? It can be annoying to save the current message as a draft, (1) or open a separate copy, (2) just so you can search (3) for what you need.
There’s a new free service that makes this kind of searching while composing a message in gmail much easier. It’s available for the Firefox and the Chrome browsers, (both of which are excellent browsers and far superior to IE, but that’s a future topic).
Most email applications let you set up folders for storing messages you want to save. You have to decide what category your message fits into, if you want to keep it (but not in the Inbox), make sure you have a folder with that name, and store the message there. Then, when you want the message, you have to remember what folder you saved it in.
gMail offers a different system where you label messages and, if you want to store them rather than leave them in the Inbox, you can archive them. The big difference is -
You can use as many labels as you want for one message!
Sometimes I only use one label, but often I use two or even three. “So what?” you ask. Well there are several ways I benefit from this attribute of gmail.
What I’ve just mentioned, – I can use multiple labels, so I don’t have to remember which folder I put a message in; I just have to remember one of the categories I’m likely to have labelled the message with.
I can create the labels I want for my own purposes by clicking on either “Manage labels” or “Create new label”. These will take me to Settings/Labels (or I can just go directly there) and I can manage my labels. It’s easy to add the labels that are useful for you, and if you have a lot of labels, you can choose which ones to hide or show.
Also, I can make the labels different colours, which helps me sort my messages visually.
I simply click on the space beside the label and choose the colour. Easy.
To find messages again, whether in your Inbox or your gmail Archive (and gmail gives you LOTS of storage space), you can put a keyword or name from the message you want into the gmail Search field - or, and this is what I really, really love – you can click directly on the label on the left, and all the messages with that label, whether in the Inbox or the Archive, will appear.
So that’s the story with gmail’s labels instead of other mail application’s folders. I find it way more convenient to organize my messages when I can add my own multiple labels and archive messages, and then sort by colour and clicking on labels.
Years ago I had a Hotmail address as well as an address based on my service provider and one for the institution I worked for. Three email addresses:
one I could open on any wired computer, as long as I remembered the exact address and my password for it (didn’t always happen),
another I could open on my work computer,
a third I could open on my home computer.
Of course I could use Webmail for my work and home addresses, but it was a pain. And so was opening three different addresses. The Hotmail address died from neglect and forgetfulness, but the other two were important, and it was irritating to have two different email accounts. (Hey, laziness and forgetfulness aren’t my dominant characteristics, but I do avoid any web stuff that isn’t EASY!)
I found a solution, and that’s what this, the first in a series of posts about gmail, is about: how gmail lets you read all your email in one place, yet answer from other sites.
(This post has been inspired by a friend leaving the institution where she has worked for years, and where her email address will be terminated when she leaves.)
Why gMail?
It’s free!
You can choose your address.
And this is the important one -> you can forward all your other addresses to gmail so you can see ALL your messages in ONE place. (You can also reply from the address the message came to! without leaving the gmail page.)
(My friend’s son did this for her, so she had her gmail address, but she still had to check her other addresses. Here are the instructions for how I did the next step for her.)
Click on “Settings” on the upper right of the gmail page.
Then, go to “Accounts and Import” -
Click on the Import button – for more detailed instructions go here
Don’t forget to click on the button that lets you reply from the same address the message is sent to.
Just add your addresses one at a time and answer the confirmation email that arrives at your original address.
That’s it! Now all your addresses funnel into your gmail account so you only have one place to look, making your life easier! And my friend really likes that part of gmail, (which her son hadn’t set up for her.)
Soon, I’ll explain how to use Labels in gmail, and why they are better than folders in other email applications.
I firmly believe that re-inventing the wheel (often done on the web) is superfluous, so when I find useful material, I don’t re-create it, I give credit and link to it.
I like to save the URLs of sites or pages I might need in the future. Because I have had to change computers from work to home and because I’ve had computers crash and die, I like to keep my bookmarks in the cloud, that is, I like to use web applications to save my bookmarks, rather than save them in my browser. To do that, I mostly use Diigo, which I also backup to delicious, (just in case either fails).
What I like about Diigo, is that I can add a description of the site, and, in some browsers, Chrome for sure, I can highlight sections of the webpage text and have it show in my Diigo library.
Google is a good first place to search, but Wolfram Alpha goes places Google doesn’t, and you should add it to your searching strategy, especially if you’re a student, or engage in business transactions, or if you are just a curious person.
So add Wolfram Alpha to your bookmarks, wherever you save them - on your favorite browser, on your NewsReader, or in a notebook that you keep on your desk. And spend some time asking Wolfram Alpha questions, so you can see what it can do!
When you want to send messages that are almost exactly the same to many people, but you want to make small changes, you could copy & paste and alter and send to individuals. Or you could use the Google Labs feature, Canned Responses.
Google Labs is found by clicking the icon of a green Lab beaker found on gmail’s upper right, between your address and Settings.
When you click on that, you find many experimental features, among them, Canned Responses.
When you enable it, it shows up in your Compose screen.
Then, you create the main message, leaving blank spaces where you want to add different words or numbers for different individuals.
This was a fairly complex message with many areas to add information, (marked in red) but I sent individual information out to over 30 people, and they liked getting private messages.
Here’s the menu I used -
You can have a number of different canned messages, and personalize them before sending them out.
Sometimes we need to send a message to many people, and gmail makes that easy. Here are two situations:
Sending the same message to a group of people and respecting their privacy; and
Sending the same message with some small changes for each person in a group of people.
Sending the Same Message to a Group of People and Respecting Their Privacy
If you want exactly the same message to go to a group of people, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t want to look (and behave) like an unskilled newbie and share all the addresses publicly. Instead you want to be polite and digitally sophisticated and hide the individual addresses from the group, thus respecting their privacy. Here’s how:
Go to gmail’s Contacts
Chose the group you are sending to (I’m protecting my and my Contacts privacy by blanking out most of their names and addresses) -
Check off the people you want to send to in the group you chose and click on email -
All the addresses show up in the “To:” field, and if you click on “Send” at this point, everybody will get to see all the other addresses, and that’s considered poor privacy management, so don’t click “Send” yet! Instead copy and remove the addresses and click on “Bcc” (Blind carbon copy).
Paste the addresses into the Bcc field and address the email to yourself, add an informative subject, and hit “Send”. Voila! Privacy respected and many people receive the same message!
More on how to send almost the same message to a number of different people, respecting their privacy and saving yourself time next post!
These will take me to Settings/Labels (or I can just go directly there) and I can manage my labels.
It’s easy to add the labels that are useful for you, and if you have a lot of labels, you can choose which ones to hide or show.
I simply click on the space beside the label and choose the colour. Easy.
or, and this is what I really, really love – you can click directly on the label on the left, and all the messages with that label, whether in the Inbox or the Archive, will appear.
You can have a number of different canned messages, and personalize them before sending them out.
Joan works and plays on the web and is happy to speak to groups or individuals about the web's communication possibilities
