Google astonished everyone by launching Gmail back in 2004 with a then-generous 1GB of storage; today, that's climbed to 7.3GB. Thanks to all that space—along with threaded conversations, a powerful spam filter, conversation labels, and more—Gmail remains a standout amid other free webmail products that have been around much longer. Here's how to tap all that power under its hood.
Email From Other Accounts
Which account do you want to use today?
Gmail's features are great, but what if you don't want to change your email addresses? You don't have to. Gmail comes with a built-in POP fetcher, which can retrieve messages from up to five existing email accounts and drop them in your Gmail inbox. You can also set up multiple From addresses that match your existing accounts. This way, when you send an email in Gmail, you can have it originate from your Gmail account or from your alternate From addresses. To start using other email addresses within Gmail, go to Settings and enter your other account details in the Accounts tab.
Access Gmail in Mail via IMAP
With IMAP settings, you can keep Gmail in step across all your devices and the web.
While many email providers provide only one-way POP downloads of your messages, Gmail offers IMAP, the more sophisticated, two-way sync protocol. With IMAP, you can access your Gmail on multiple computers and mobile devices, and the changes you make on one device are immediately reflected everywhere else. IMAP syncs the read and unread status of all your Gmail messages in all your labels (represented as traditional folders in your IMAP client of choice). To enable IMAP in Gmail's Settings, click the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. You'll have to configure your email program using Gmail's secure IMAP settings; click the "Configuration instructions" link to get instructions for adding your Gmail account to Mail for access from your Mac.
Mute a Chatty Email Thread
Mute your friends who insist on hitting Reply All.
When an email conversation is stuck in a never-ending Reply All cycle and you wish you weren't on the recipient list, open the conversation and choose Mute from Gmail's "More actions" menu. This will silence the thread, meaning that any new replies to it will skip your inbox and be archived automatically.
You can still search for and find muted messages; you just won't get notifications of new replies while it's going on. To find conversations you've muted, enter "is:muted" (without the quotes) into Gmail's search box.
Tame Your Inbox with Filters
It's simple to separate your important email from all the sales pitches, newsletters, and Facebook alerts using Gmail's built-in filters. First, create a label (or multiple labels, if you're really organized) to mark all your "other" email. In the From box, paste in an address that you'd like to filter—or an entire domain, such as @facebookmail.com. Click Test Search to verify that your new filter is catching the correct messages; a list of existing emails will show up below. If it's correct, click Next Step.
Use filters to label and sort your Gmail automagically.
The next screen in the setup process sets up actions for your filtered messages that you want filtered. To avoid an inbox filled with unread crud, select both "Skip the Inbox" and "Mark as read." Click "Apply the label" and choose the label you just created. Select "Also apply filter to XX conversations below" to move your existing messages into the right place.
Supercharge Gmail in the Labs
Gmail Labs (Google's experimental testing ground for new features-in-progress) is full of cool add-ons. Google routinely "graduates" Labs features out into the main interface, but you can enable the future today by clicking Settings in the upper-right corner, then going to the Labs tab. You'll find loads there, but these three are our favorites:
Mark As Read Button: Quickly marks messages as read. Gmail doesn't mind a little white lie every now and then.
Send & Archive: Dash off a reply and archive the thread with a single click.
Old Snakey: Email is boring. Play the old-school Snake game at the push of a button.
In Christ,
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