Root's Workshop: Gmail

OK, so you have a gmail account but you want to utilize everything it has to offer.

Welcome to the Workshop.

Sit back and relax because this post is a long one... but how could I justify a post called "Workshop" if it wasn't long?

I've got a number of tricks that I use during my day-to-day email flurry that I feel compelled to share with the world... because that's how I balance the universe.

And I'm cool a nerd like that.

So where to start?

The first date, and first impressions.

Lets start with the Archive button.

OoooooOooo. Archive button. Push it. Push it!

But no, seriously. Use it. Something about emails in my inbox, whether read or unread, annoy me. Archiving emails will move it out of sight and out of mind. That's all. Google really doesn't believe in deleting emails (thus the infinite + 1 GB theory), although you can. But really, there is no need to. "Archive" and "Report Spam/Phishing" buttons are all you need.

Feel like you need to balance your own universe? Use the "Report Spam/Phishing" buttons. This will help Gmail know which emails, in other gmail user's inboxes, is spam. More you help them, the more you help me. Good job you.

I know many of you might not like labels, or don't use them at all and find them pointless, but in the long run they only help you. I personally use them if I know that I'm going to receive a lot of email from 1) a group of people or 2) a certain category of emails.... or 3) I want to flag certain emails as important (like bills).

Why use labels? Well for searching, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, how do you set up labels to work automatically? Let's face it, most of us are too lazy to mark emails, as they come in, under certain labels unless it is rare enough of a label (like the "Star" label).

Welcome to the second date, aka "Settings" area (top right of your screen).

...And welcome to Filters. Filters are ran automatically on emails coming in. Do you have a certain FROM email addresses that you know you'd like to label all emails (ex: support@eggxpert.com for all Eggxpert related forum reply emails)?

And while you are in the Settings area, you might find "Personal Level indicators". I like this feature because I can immediately know if an email in my inbox is sent directly to me or if it's part of a mass email and I'm just one of those lucky many who are on your "FWD" list.

You know who you are.

You can easily see this at a glance by looking at the > and >> symbols next to the subject line in your inbox.

Oooo, or the "Foward" feature where you can have multiple gmail accounts all forwarded to one email address... or better yet the "Send as" feature where from that one email account, not only can you receive mail from other accounts but also send email on behalf of those other accounts (instead of logging off and logging back on to that second of tenth account).  

Another snazy feature is the keyboard shortcuts. Turn this sucker on and you can navigate almost anywhere in your Gmail account with just the keyboard (and it's fast when you get use to them). I won't list them all here, so just check out that link (or when you are in Gmail, hit the ? button).

I personally like the "m" shortcut. It "mutes" a conversation so it stays in the archive, even if someone continues to reply to you. *evil grin*

 
Let me guess, you already knew all these things because you are smart and can navigate the Settings place? Fine. FIne.

The infamous Third date.

Nervous?

Good.

Let's dig a little deeper into Gmail. Have you ever heard of tags? Sure you have. Tags for blogs. Tags for Youtube. Tags are the very 2.0 thing these days. Well Gmail, being a very 2.0 company, incorporated tags into it's email system... and no, I'm not talking about labels (although technically they could be called tags).

Say your email address is JohnSmith@gmail.com and you sign up to playboy a newsletter for the great articles. You being a savant in Gmail, you utilize a tag and sign up with the email address JohnSmith+FTGA@gmail.com.

What the gmail mail server will do, when it receives an email from this well established newsletter company, it will look at the address it sent it to, in this example: JohnSmith+FTGA. Well gmail is smart enough to know that your account is JohnSmith and anything after the + it will ignore as a tag, so it will forward on to you. What is so great about this? Well, with filters, you can actually (instead of specifying a FROM address) specify the TO address, for said well established newsletter and it's great articles with JohnSmith+FTGA@gmail.com

And hey, even better? You receive spam from MrHardOn@ezboy.au (gotta love those aussies) addressed to JohnSmith+FTGA. Hmmm, I wonder where they bought your email address from.

The only issue with tags is sometimes websites will not accept the + as a valid character when you type in your email address. 

While tags are nice and all, the real inner beauty of Gmail is in it's Search. So let's focus more on that simple but powerful search bar. Say you automatically label, with your spiffy filters, emails coming in from BankofAmerica.com with a "BoA" label.

And for the sake of this example (and not that this has EVER happen to me), you had an issue with BoA way back when and you couldn't remember the person you had talked to... and the issue is being brought up again and they are claiming that they've never done (insert good customer service act) before. You're pretty sure it was three months ago, and say today is 4/1/2008

You being sway, you type into the Search field:

label:BoA before:2/1/2008 after:1/1/2008

How cool is that? You can also just drop off the "after" parameter if you aren't sure when you got it.... or the other way around, leave the after: parameter and drop the "before".

Oooo, or better yet, you just got back from vacation and have 1500 emails that you haven't opened yet (true story). So you have all these emails with labels, and most of the labels you know aren't important or you know certain labels that you want to see.  For this example, lets say I wanted to check all new EggXpert threads that were posted in Storage. Because I subscribe to the storage category, I receive all replies to the storage thread.

I would probably type in the Search field: 

label:EggX label:inbox label:unread "in Storage"

 Notice the "inbox" and "unread" labels. That's right, almost everything is considered a label, even "trash" or "sent".  The "in Storage" part is for the type of Eggxpert alerts. Because I know ALL emails coming from the Storage thread will say "Posted by username in Storage", I use the quote marks to make an exact search for "in Storage" -- note it isn't case sensitive.

Or say I vaguely remember an email from my mom a long time ago that had an attachment (can't remember what type of file it was) with phone numbers of all my kin (I know, I know, who uses the word kin these days?).

 From:Mom@address.com has:attachment

Better yet, you can't remember if mom or dad sent it to you

From:Mom@address.com OR From:Dad@address.com has:attachment

The OR operator (has to be in caps) will find any emails from either mom or dad.

Now lets say you have a family Label but you know it wasn't sent by your brother but could have been by your parents/sister

label:Family -From:brother@address.com has:attachment

The - will exclude any results that fit that particular query. But say that you have too many search results and you know for certain that it was a .xls spreadsheet

label:Family -from:brother@address.com filename:xls

Or you know that inside the filename it says "contacts", but you don't know what type of filetype it is... and suppose you already added your brother in your contacts list and gave him the alias of "Ahole"

label:Family -from:Ahole filename:contacts

 Let's change it up a bit. Let's say you are looking for an email from your friend Jack (whose email address is already in your contacts, and he is listed under "Playa") and he gave you directions to the movie theater near his new place along with this restaurant. Can't remember when he gave it to you but you are going to be visiting and you want to hit two birds with one stone--you bring your GF. You are pretty sure the subject said "Double date is double trouble". So you try this search

from:Playa subject:"Double date is double trouble"

It brings up a past email from him but it was his previous girl friend. Figures. But wait, you were almost certain it had the word "double" and "date" in the subject line... and know for a fact it mentioned his new girl friend in the body of the email. So you try this one:

from:Playa(Lindsy) subject:(double date)

This search looks for all messages from your friend Jack, with the word "Lindsy" anywhere in the email but it has to have the word "Double" AND "Date" in the subject line. And guess what? You found it: "I'm  on a date with Lindsy's double shhh :-)"

You might have noticed the chat feature integrated with gmail. I use it all the time and guess what? You can search it too:

label:chat from:Playa Lindsy "white KF version"

You can also incorporate the tags into this for an added layer of search ability using the "to:" parameter... or "cc:" or "bc:" if you use those when sending mail.

Don't be a fool, wrap your tool.

Google is also pretty cool about being secure conscience. Two things I'd just like to mention. One is about getting your entire email (and chat *grin*) session into an encrypted session. This is done by logging into gmail via it's secured portal:

https://mail.google.com

Not only is your login secure (which is typical with http://mail.google.com or any of the links to gmail from Google's main site), but also your entire session with gmail (after the initial login). This means that from your laptop/computer to Google's email server, you are encrypted. This doesn't mean from Google to your destination is encrypted, mind you, but it's still snazy in my book.

The other neat 'security' thing I found is that Google doesn't forward on your IP address in it's headers when you send an email to someone. What does this mean? Well, no one can't figure out your geographical location, or ISP that you sent your email from. What some people don't know is that most email providers will forward on your IP address in the header. Why would they forward on your IP address? It's an easy way to know if an email was intercepted/rerouted/legit. Want to learn more about headers? Check this link out.

My only warning to you fine users is to not us Gmail as a Gdrive... not that I just gave you a keyword to use in Google to find programs to utilize Gmail as a storage drive. Granted, I'm guilty of occasionally use the "Save Now" feature to save notes to myself as a draft... or documents. But I would never use Gdrive for it is unreliable. Google could suspend your account or make modifications to their backend to render it useless. Too risky in my book. Save Now feature is good enough for me for unimportant stuff.

That's all for now. Hope you guys enjoy this Workshop. If I ever have the time, I'll get into Google Desktop as well as Google's search itself, which is a beast in it own right. If you guys would like to request a workshop from me, or a Classroom 101 post, or just a quick question, feel free to comment here or PM me. 

Until the next Workshop,

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