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9 tips to take Gmail control

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

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With over 1.5 million users Gmail is by far the most popular email service on the planet. It is even more popular that Outlook and Yahoo Mail. It is a great program with lots of features and, as you’d expect with a Google product, it is constantly evolving. If you follow Softonic news, you’ll know just how often Google is adding new features like advanced search bar, canned responses, and email snooze and  mute . As well as Google adding new features, third-party developers are also able to create Chrome browser add-ons like a to-do-list app that also boost Gmail’s capabilities.

Gmail tips

9 tips to take Gmail control

Where do you start though? If you’re trying to step up your Gmail game, take advantage of all it has to offer, and make your life easier in the process, where do you begin? Well, that’s where we come in. Today we’re going to look at some of the best Gmail features and give you some top Gmail tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your email provider.

How to use Gmail

Shortcut cheat sheet

Gmail keyboard shortcut cheat sheet

A great place to start this list is the Gmail keyboard shortcut cheat sheet. There are a lot of actions you can perform on Gmail simply and quickly by pressing a certain combination of keys. This cheat sheet gives you a list of these keyboard shortcuts. To access it all you need to do is press Shift ?.

Unsend sent messages

Undo send on Gmail

Did you know that you can actually give yourself a short window of opportunity to unsend Gmail messages you’ve sent. This is extremely useful, if you ever find yourself cursing your own existence when you realize you’ve forgotten to mention something important in the email you’ve just sent. To enable the Gmail unsend feature go to Settings then search in the General tab, and then tick the box next to Enable Undo Send. You can also set the time you’ll give yourself to reconsider at 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Don’t forget to hit Save when you’re done and then keep an eye out for the Undo Send option when you send a new message.

Spelling mistakes

Check spelling on Gmail

Normally email messages are important messages, which means spelling mistakes are a big no no. Fortunately, Gmail has a feature that will highlight any spelling mistakes you’ve made so that you can easily change them. To use this feature all you need to do is click the ellipsis menu icon  in the bottom-right corner of your Gmail compose window and hit Check Spelling.

Infinite Gmail accounts

OK, so this trick doesn’t give you an infinite amount of Gmail accounts, but it does give you plenty to play around with, should you need to sign up to an online account more than once. Basically, full stops in your Gmail address don’t count for anything. This means if you send an email to emailaddress@gmail.com and another to email.address@gmail.com both emails will go to the same inbox. This means you can add full stops between every letter of your Gmail address to create a new email you can use to sign up to accounts with. This is also a good way of tracking who is selling your data as you can monitor which accounts have full stops in certain places and then compare that list to the email addresses you receive your spam to.

Schedule send

Gmail schedule send

Gmail’s schedule send feature is fairly new. You used to have to enable the feature using Gmail Labs, but now it is here for everybody to use and it couldn’t be simpler. To schedule an email to send at a later date all you need to do is hit the small down arrow that is next to the send button. This will open up the Schedule send option, which will give you the chance to send your email exactly when you want the recipient to receive it.

Add or remove inbox tabs

Gmail inbox tabs

The Gmail Inbox tabs are a great way of keeping on top of your incoming mail. If you’re toiling away to reach Inbox Zero, tabs can help you a great deal by automatically cutting out the emails you don’t really need to handle yourself. They’ll automatically be added to different tabs and so won’t class as primary emails. To customize your Gmail tabs go to Settings, then Inbox, and then hit Categories. Once you’ve activated all your tabs you can then drag and drop individual messages between them to help Google classify your incoming mail better.

Desktop notifications

You can set Gmail to send you a desktop notification every time you receive an email. To do so go to Settings, then General, and then Desktop Notifications. Once enabled, Gmail will send you a pop-up notification every time you’ve got mail.

Filter your newsletter signups

Gmail has a very cool feature that allows you to add words and phrases to your email address by putting a  sign after it. For example, if I was to send an email to myemail@gmail.com and myemail+softonic@gmail.com, both emails would go to the same inbox. This means I could sign up for various email newsletters and use the sign plus different categories to make it easier to search through my regular newsletters. Categories like News, Sports, Tech, etc. to help me search for particular types of content that are being pinged to my inbox.

Easy unsubscribe

Gmail unsubscribe

Email newsletters can be annoying. Tabs make it easier for you to keep on top of them, but still, they’re a real pain, especially the ones you can’t remember signing up to. The truth is you’re pressured into signing up for newsletters all the time these days. Want to buy some clothes online, sign up to an email; looking to find a local bus schedule, sign up online; want to do absolutely anything you could think of on the internet, yep, sign up online. Fortunately, however, Gmail has an elegant solution to this very modern problem. For every email you receive that has an unsubscribe button hidden away at the bottom, Gmail will create an Unsubscribe button at the top of the email next to the email address.

There you have some top tips for the Gmail app. For more great guides to Google apps and products like Google Drive, Google Calendar,  and Hangouts stick with Softonic.

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney is a news reporter for Softonic, keeping readers up to date on everything affecting their favorite apps and programs. His beat includes social media apps and sites like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Patrick also covers antivirus and security issues, web browsers, the full Google suite of apps and programs, and operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.

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