Things about Gmail you might not know

By Payal Dhar Jun 14 2010

Love it or hate it, but it’s impossible to turn a blind eye to

Google’s inexorable integration in our lives. Not only has internet searching been made more or less synonymous with the term ‘to Google’, it is quite unusual to come across an email user without a Gmail account. It forms the nervous system of our online communications—integrating chat (including voice and video) with emails.

Despite its streamlined look, Gmail packs in a whole lot of features. Let’s take a look at five things you might want to examine:

Undo sent messages

Save yourself major blushes with the ability to stop an outgoing message or recall a mail after it’s been sent. Your window of opportunity, however, is fairly slim since emails are supposed to be an instant method of communicating, so there’s no point realising your mistake the next morning. This feature, called Undo Sent, can be activated from Labs. Associated with this is ‘Got the Wrong Bob’, which checks whether you are sending message to the right person if you have two people of the same name in your contacts list.

Use a custom mail ID

You can use Gmail as a ‘front’ for your you@your-domain.com email ID. This is particularly useful for those who have their own websites and would like to use their custom email IDs. Once again, this is fairly simple to set up. Go to Settings Ý Accounts and Import. In the ‘Send mail as’ section, click on the ‘Send mail from another address’ button. To change the display name associated with the email sending address, click on the ‘Edit’ button in that section.

Offline mode

The offline option of Gmail allows you to continue using Gmail if you are disconnected from the internet or have a slow connection. If enabled, it downloads a cache of your mail to your desktop, and you can mark, organise and even reply to your messages. Once your connection is back up, the messages in your outbox are automatically sent and your cache is synchronised with the Gmail servers. The given settings include prioritising mail for download, such as those marked with certain labels, date range, or mails with an attachment size limit.

Labs

Labs is a repository of some cool additions to your Gmail. Look for the icon of a beaker in the top right corner. A particularly useful add-on is the inbox preview while Gmail loads. It uses all the browser white space to display what’s the latest in your inbox, and you can sign out before the loading is complete if the contents don’t thrill you. A boon for users on slow and unreliable networks. There are dozens and dozens of other tweaks that can help with changing how Gmail looks and works. Check it out—you’re sure to find some nice surprises.

Google Ninjas

If you think getting the most out of Gmail is a tedious process or trawling through its settings and Labs (not that that is a bad thing to do), you’re wrong. The Google tips (http://www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html) page categorises users depending on the volume of messages received and provides a very useful listing of features that you might want to take a look at depending on which Google Ninja category you fall into.

Payal Dhar is a freelance technology writer

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