Advanced Gmail Features

Are you hooked using Gmail? If you’ve been using the email service for any period of time, you have become accustomed to many of the convenient features. For me, I couldn’t live without the web based email program. I have several email accounts forwarded to Gmail. My websites receive substantial email correspondence related to them on a daily basis. In order to manage it all, I’ve utilized Gmail’s filters, shortcuts, and advanced features. I’ll show you how I’ve organized my email to the point any message is only a few clicks away, as well as introduce you to a few other tips and tricks to make Gmail more versatile.

Learning to Use Filters

In our previous article, we discussed labels. Labels can help you find crucial messages with a single mouse click. Did you know there’s an easier way to label many of your incoming messages? You can assign labels to messages before opening them. I’ll show you how to setup these filters to do just that.

How to Setup a Filter in Gmail

1. Select Create a Filter in the upper toolbar.
   
   
2. Type in an email address in the From field. Use any other identifying email characteristics in this step of the setup process. Newsletters and automatcally sent mail often has similar subjects for example. Or mail from a particular organization or company may be able to be filtered if the sender's always include a signiture with a unique word. Be sure not to exclude emails due to too stringent filtering properties. Choose next step when you feel satisfied the emails from a specific service or person will be filtered with the criterion you entered.
   
   
3. Choose what action you want to take with any messages that meet your filter criterion. For instance, you can label messages from a Credit Card company as Credit Card Statements. You could also forward specific emails on to another email address.
   
   
   
   You can create as many filters as you like. They help you sort emails before you even take notice of them. When you archive messages, they retain their labeled properties. This means they can be retrieved quickly and easily.