! Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! The Beginner’s Guide to Gmail Written by Ryan Dube Published October 2017. Read the original article here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ultimate-guide-to-gmail/ This ebook is the intellectual property of MakeUseOf. It must only be published in its original form. Using parts or republishing altered parts of this ebook is prohibited without permission from MakeUseOf.com. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Table of contents The Huge Advantages of Gmail 4 Create a Gmail Account 5 The Gmail Inbox 6 Use Category Tabs 6 Compose an Email 7 Format Email Text 8 Select a Theme 10 Sent Mail, Spam, Trash and More 11 Tips to Organize Your Email 12 Contacts 12 Stars 13 Labels 14 Advanced Gmail Features 14 General Settings 14 Accounts and Import 16 Using Filters 18 Email Forwarding and POP/IMAP 21 Offline Email 22 Labs 22 Cool Gmail Integrations 24 The Mobile Gmail App 24 The King of Cloud-Based Email 27 Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Are you looking for help with your new Gmail account? Or, are you still trying to figure out what all your Gmail email settings mean? You’ve come to the right place. In this guide, I’m going to… • Show you how to create a new Gmail account. • Understand the Inbox and how to organize your email. • Look at advanced Gmail features. • Talk about the Gmail mobile app. • Point out how third-party cloud services work with your Gmail account online (or even offline). Whether you already have a Gmail account, or you’re thinking about signing up for one, this guide will have everything you need to make the most use of that shiny new Gmail account. The Huge Advantages of Gmail When you sign up for the first time, you will have access to a long list of Google services, not just email. The most commonly used of those services include: • Google Drive: Where you can create spreadsheets, documents, and even slideshow presentations using a free library of cloud-based office applications. You also get lots of space to store all of your files. We offer a full guide to Google Drive if you need one. • Google Maps: A web and mobile-based app to help you find directions and navigate with traffic, satellite views, user photos of places and more. You can even use Google Maps for interesting things like finding parking or exploring the solar system. • YouTube: Now that Google bought YouTube, your Google account gives you access to all free features that are available on YouTube. • Google Calendar: A cloud-based calendar system that lets you organize your day in a very intuitive, easy-to-use graphical interface, both on the web and on your phone. • Google Keep: Think sticky notes for your computer and your phone. It’s a great alternative to Evernote. • Google Contacts: Sync all of your contacts across your email, all Google services, and your phone. • Google Analytics, Adwords, and Adsense: To track, promote and monetize your websites. This is just a small subset of the cloud services you get access to when you first sign up for your brand new Google account. If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, then let’s get started with creating your very first Google Account! Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Create a Gmail Account When you first visit the Google Gmail page, at the upper right you’ll see a large red box where you can Create An Account. Click it. On the next page, you’ll see a simple form to enter your personal details like birthday, gender, phone number and email address, and of course your name, username, and preferred password. Just keep in mind that these days there are many thousands of users on Gmail. So, you most likely won’t get an account name that matches your real name. To get around this, a lot of people use their full name followed by a random sequence of numbers. Don’t forget to follow our tips for choosing a good password. Phone number and a secondary email address are optional, but it’s a good idea to include them since these will be the only way Google can confirm your account should you ever get locked out. Once you accept the terms and conditions and click Continue to Gmail, you will find yourself looking at your brand new, empty inbox. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! The Gmail Inbox Your inbox is by default sorted into three tabs. The primary tab will hold all of your general incoming emails. However, if there’s any email that Google identifies as either social notifications or promotional emails, those will be sorted into the Social or Promotions tabs respectively. These are actually emails organized by “category”, which you can customize and add additional tabs if you want to. Use Category Tabs Whenever you get a new incoming email, you can click the label icon in the top menu, and either select a category or create a new one for that email. Back in the main inbox, if you click on the “+” tab to the right of all of the existing tags, you’ll see a list of your current message categories. Select the new category you created and that will also show up as a new tab in your inbox. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! This is especially useful if you have a lot of projects or many different clients you’re working for, and you’d like to keep all those emails sorted into different tabs. Using categories and tabs in this way can help you keep a much cleaner, easier to maintain inbox. Compose an Email To send your first email, click on the red Compose box in the upper left corner of the inbox. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! The email composer window is probably one of the more feature-filled, powerful sections of the entire Gmail interface, so it’s worth spending a little bit of time really exploring all of the things you can do in this view. First of all, a little-known secret is that even though the email composer window opens up attached to the lower right corner of your screen, you can easily open it up into a new window by holding down the Shift key and clicking on the resize arrows at the upper right corner of the composer window. You’ll notice when you hover the mouse over the double-arrow icon with the Shift key pressed, the icon changes to a bold single arrow. Click on it and it’ll pop up the email composer into its own separate window. This just makes it a lot easier to write emails on a different area of the screen, or an entirely different screen, without blocking any of your web browser window. It lets you multitask while writing emails. Format Email Text The top of this window has the standard To, Cc, Bcc, and subject fields you’re probably familiar with if you’ve used any other web client. However unlike most web clients where the text formatting menu is at the top, in Gmail this menu can be found at the bottom of the window. This formatting bar lets you format your email text just as you would in a document editor like Microsoft Word. You can change font size, style and formatting, indent text, create numbered or bullet lists, or even include block quotes. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! The next menu under this includes other top-level menu items. By default, the formatting menu is selected, but from left to right you can: • Include an attachment (paperclip icon) • Insert files from Google Drive (Google Drive icon) • Send or request money with Google Wallet (the dollar icon) • Insert a photo (the camera icon) • Insert a hyperlink (the chain icon) • Insert an emoticon (the smiley icon) A reminder note on emoticons. Through the years, Google has gotten better at improving the available list of emoticons. These days you’ll find a scrollable list spanning 5 categories. Just keep in mind that many people don’t consider emoticons to be very professional, so make sure you’re using them sparingly, and only when the email isn’t intended for a professional audience. One other area to keep in mind when you’re composing an email is the dropdown arrow in the lower right corner. Here, you can switch to full-screen editing mode, instantly choose a label for this outgoing email, switch to plain text mode (no formatting), print the email, or check the spelling (not a bad thing to get into the habit of doing). Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Select a Theme Just like you may want to customize a new computer you buy, you might be interested in customizing your new email inbox. Gmail gives you the ability to choose from different themes so that you don’t have to face a boring white inbox every day. To select a new theme, click on the cog icon for the “Settings” at the upper right corner of the screen, just under where your profile icon is displayed. Select Themes from the list. Google offers an impressive collection of backgrounds to choose from. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Just pick one, click Select, and then Save. The background of your entire inbox will change to the selected image. Sent Mail, Spam, Trash and More Along the left side of your inbox is where you’ll find the rest of your email folders.