Posted by Martin Gruau, Consumer Operations

There is a powerful but little known Gmail feature that lives in Labs called “Add any gadget by URL.” Once you turn it on, you can add iGoogle gadgets (or any gadget specified by an .xml file) to the side of your Gmail account. While most of these gadgets are built by third-parties and not owned or maintained by Google, they can be super handy.

To install any of these gadgets, follow those steps:
1) From your Gmail account, go to the Labs tab of Gmail Settings.
2) Look for the Lab “Add any gadget by URL.” Enable it, then click “Save changes.”
3) Go to the new “Gadgets” tab under “Settings” and add the relevant .xml address.

Here’s a list of a ten I’ve found worth trying out:

Wikipedia
Look for a specific query right from Gmail.
http://www.google.com/ig/modules/wikipedia.xml


Google Calculator
Make some quick calculations while typing an email.
http://calebegg.com/calc.xml


Note
Add a sticky note to the corner of your Gmail account.
http://www.google.com/ig/modules/sticky.xml


Remember the Milk
If you’re a fan of this task management system, accessing all your “Remember the milk” notes from right within Gmail can be super handy.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/gmail/rtm.xml


PolyClock
Gives you the time of day for any place in the world.
http://gad.getpla.net/poly/clock.xml


Currency Converter
A real time currency converter.
http://helloworld123---.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/currency-converter.xml


bit.ly URL shortener
Lets you shorten URLs in a single click.
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107368512201818821991/bitly-shortener.xml


Chuck Norris fact generator
Displays a different “Chuck Norris fact” every day of the year. http://marsupialmusic.net/stu/scripts/chucknorris.xml


Finally, you might be familiar with the last two gadgets, since they are also available as individual Gmail Labs:

Google Calendar
Displays your Google Calendar agenda right from Gmail.
http://www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar.xml


Google Docs
Gives you quick access to your most recent documents.
www.google.com/ig/modules/docs.xml


You can find lots of other gadgets optimized for iGoogle on this page, and many of them work well in Gmail, too.

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager

Today is Father’s Day in many countries around the world, so whether your dad lives across the street, across the country or across the ocean, it’s a good day to let him know you’re thinking about him. Of course, email is a simple, quick way to check in with your old man, but it’s just as easy — and maybe even more meaningful — to call him right from Gmail.

If you’re in the U.S., you can use Gmail to make free domestic calls and calls to Canada. If your dad lives abroad, we have some of the best rates around, like two cents per minute to Australia, Argentina, France and many other parts of the world. (Unfortunately, those of you outside the U.S. will still have to phone Dad the old-fashioned way.)

And in case you don’t read this post in time, we've added a small note in the Gmail chat roster, right under the “Call phone” link, to remind you to give him a ring.



Happy Father’s Day from Gmail!

Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager

Gmail offers a ton of customization, and when you get hundreds of emails every day it’s crucial that you have it set up to process mail quickly and efficiently. Working on Gmail, I get asked all the time what settings and features I use to help me power through my mail. Rather than answer my friends and co-workers one by one, I thought I’d put it all into a blog post. So here goes.

• Turn on Priority Inbox. I couldn’t live without Priority Inbox. I keep the default set-up with important and unread mail at the top of my inbox and the section for everything else at the bottom.
• Show more than 25 conversations in your inbox. I like to see as many emails as possible per page so I can quickly scan through my mail, so I have this set to 100 (the max possible). Go to Gmail Settings and look for “Maximum page size” which you can change to 25, 50, or 100.
• Enable keyboard shortcuts. Press the “?” key when looking at your inbox to see the list of keyword shortcuts. Make sure they are turned on, then pick one or two to start with and try to learn more as you become comfortable. I probably use ‘e’ to archive my messages and ‘j’ and ‘k’ to move through messages the most.

Many of the features I love can be found in Gmail Labs (click on the “Labs” tab from Gmail Settings). I have a ton of them on, but the combo of these four work really well for me:

• Inbox preview: Shows a simple, static preview of your inbox while Gmail is loading. While you can’t take action on the messages until your inbox fully loads, it’s great to get a sneak peek and form a plan of attack.
• Send and archive: Adds a button that lets you send a reply to a message and archive the conversation in a single click (keyboard shortcuts work well with this one, too).
• Background send: Lets Gmail send your mail in the background while you move on to more important things.
• Auto advance: Automatically shows the next conversation instead of going back to your inbox after you delete, archive, or mute a conversation. When combined with the “Send and archive” button and background send, this feature makes reading and replying to messages lightning fast.

Try out this set up and let us know what your favorite features are.

Posted by Diana Phan, Gmail Support Team

October is National Cyber Security Awareness month and a good time for a reminder about why hijackers do what they do and how you can protect your account. Check out the Online Security blog to learn about common hijacking techniques and security practices that will help you stay one step ahead of the bad guys. To help ensure your Gmail account is safe, take a minute to visit the Gmail help center and complete our new security checklist.

Posted by Kristen Lemons, Gmail Support Team

It’s been a week since we launched Priority Inbox, and now that you've hopefully had a chance to try it out, we wanted to share some tips to help you manage your email more efficiently. Here are five ways you can make Priority Inbox work even better for you:

1. Customize your sections
By default, Priority Inbox has three sections: "Important and Unread," "Starred" and "Everything Else.” But that doesn't mean you have to leave them that way. You can make a section show messages from a particular label (like your “Action” or “To-do” label), add a fourth section, or change the maximum size of any section. Visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings to customize your sections, or do it right from the inline menus.



2. Train the system
If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.



For those of you who can't live without keyboard shortcuts, don’t worry, you can use the "+" and "-" keys to adjust importance as well.

3. See the best of your filtered messages
You can set up Priority Inbox to show you not just the best of your inbox, but also the best of messages you filter out of your inbox and might otherwise miss. Just change your Priority Inbox settings to “Override filters” and Gmail will surface any important messages that would otherwise skip your inbox.



With this option turned on, you can use filters to archive more aggressively and worry less about missing an important message.

4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not)
If you read and reply to a lot of messages from your mom, Gmail should automatically put incoming messages from her in the “Important and unread” section. But if you want to be 100% sure that all messages from your mom (or your boss, boyfriend, client, landlord, etc.) are marked important, you can create a filter for messages from that sender and select “Always mark as important.” Similarly, if you regularly read messages from your favorite magazine, they should automatically get marked as important. If you’d rather they end up in the “Everything else” section, you can create a filter to never mark them as important.

5. Archive unimportant messages quickly
One of the features that can help make you more efficient is the ability to archive all of the visible messages in the "Everything Else" section at once. Just click on the down arrow next to "Everything Else" and select the "Archive all visible items" option. If you want to be able to archive even more messages at once, you can increase the maximum number of messages that show in that section from the same drop-down.

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager

The more I use Google Docs, the less I have to deal with sending attachments back and forth. While attachments' days may be waning, they're still very much a part of most people's email experience. Here are five things you may not know you can do with Gmail to make sending, receiving, viewing, and finding attachments easier:

1. Drag attachments in
Simply drag files from your desktop right into the message you're composing and they'll upload from there. (Make sure you're using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for this to work.)



2. Select multiple attachments
Attaching multiple files one by one is no fun. Instead, just multi-select the files you want to attach by holding down the Ctrl key (or Command on a Mac) and clicking on each file you want to attach. Holding down the Shift key will select a continuous list of files.



3. Never forget an attachment again
Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file (things like "I've attached" or "see attachment") and warns you if it looks like you forgot to do so. Every day, this saves tons of people the embarrassment of having to send a follow up email with the file actually attached.



4. View attachments online
When you receive an attachment, sometimes you just want to view it and there's no need to download or save to your desktop. The Google Docs viewer allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser. Just click the "View" link at the bottom of the message.


5. Find that long lost attachment via search
If you're looking for an attachment someone has sent to you, Gmail's advanced search operators can help you find what you're looking for quickly and accurately.

A couple examples:

• To find all messages that contain attachments: has:attachment
• To find all messages from your friend David that contain attachments: from:david has:attachment
• To find all messages that have .pdf attachments: has:attachment pdf
• To find a specific attachment named physicshomework.txt: filename:physicshomework.txt

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps

Working with a lot of small business owners who have moved their email over to Google Apps, we’ve found that many started out managing their work email through their personal @gmail.com accounts. So, in honor of National Small Business Week and the estimated 27.2 million small businesses in America, we wanted to share some tips we’ve picked up from them (and other people at Google) on how to get the most out of using Gmail at work.

1. Get a Gmail account at your own domain (e.g. michelle@yourdomain.com) with Google Apps. Google Apps is a suite of communication and collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, which run on your own domain, so instead of using your @gmail.com email address, you (and other employees) can have email addresses @yourdomain.com. Using a customized email address can help build an identity around your business and make you look more professional along the way.

2. Add a custom signature to the bottom of your email messages. Email signatures are automatically inserted at the bottom of every message you send, and can be a great place to add your title, contact information, and even the latest news from your company. Just go to Settings at the top of your inbox and enter your signature text in the box at the bottom.


3. Manage multiple email accounts from a single interface. If you’re like a lot of business owners, you probably regularly receive email in several different accounts. By centralizing your correspondence in Gmail, you’ll be able to keep track of it all more easily. To do this, either forward your other email addresses to your main Gmail account or route them there using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher, which downloads messages via POP from up to five other accounts. To set it up, visit the Account and Import tab under Settings.

4. Set up custom “From” addresses. This feature allows you to send messages from Gmail with one of your other email addresses listed as the sender. Once you set it up, you can choose the address you want to reply from while composing messages in the "From:" address drop down. This too is under Settings on the Account and Import tab.

5. Embrace labels. Folders are familiar, especially when it comes to work email. If you want to organize your emails in a similar way, make sure you’re using Gmail labels. Combined with filters, they can be a powerful tool to manage your mail. Create labels for projects, vendors, customers, weekly reports, launches, to-do’s -- the list goes on. You can also add custom colors to your labels, order them based on priority, and search the contents of specific labels. And don’t forget that you can drag messages into labels, just like you can with folders.

6. Use chat and video chat to communicate with colleagues, or provide real-time customer support.
No matter where everyone is located, you can communicate in real-time as though you were in the same room with video chat or just chat via voice or text. Try using “Reply by chat” at the bottom of each message if you want to reach the sender quickly. To add video chat capabilities to Gmail, all you need is this small plugin and a webcam.












7. Keep track of your to-do’s with Tasks.
You spend a lot of time in your inbox, so why not keep track of what you have to do there too? Tasks allows you to create multiple lists, add notes to each task, assign due dates, and get the satisfaction of checking off completed items.









8. Use offline Gmail anytime you're not online. Despite having Internet access almost everywhere, work may take you to places where you just can’t get online. Turn on offline Gmail from the Offline tab under Settings, and Gmail will download a local cache of your mail which synchronizes with Gmail's servers while you’re connected. When you lose connectivity, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, so you can continue to work, and your replies are automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection.

9. Create canned responses and quickly reply to common questions. When it comes to emailing at work, you’re probably used to sending out weekly reports, or answering the same questions from customers or colleagues multiple times. That’s where canned responses can save precious time: turn on this feature in Gmail Labs, compose your response once, save it, then use it over and over again.


10. Make sure you have the right Bob before hitting send. If you’ve ever accidentally sent a personal email to the wrong co-worker, or emailed your internal meeting notes to an external contact, then you'll want to turn on “Got the wrong Bob?” from the Labs tab under Settings. Based on the groups of people you email most often, Gmail will try to flag when you've accidentally included the wrong person.

For more tips, check out gmail.com/tips. To keep up with the latest news on using Gmail and other Google products at work, follow us on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Matt Steiner, Software Engineer

We've been constantly updating Google Buzz, adding features that you've requested and making small tweaks that improve the experience for power users. Here are three things that have rolled out over the last couple weeks, one as recently as today:

1. Deliver interesting posts to your inbox. Sometimes you're really interested in a certain conversation and would like to get it delivered to your inbox. You used to have to comment on a post in order to get updates sent to your inbox. Now, you can set the post to be delivered to your inbox regardless of whether or not you've participated. Click the down-arrow in the upper right-hand corner of a post, and select "Deliver to my Inbox."



2. Disable comments. If a conversation you've started has run its course, you can opt to prevent further comments. For example, we just closed comments on this post soliciting questions for our SXSW panel since the talk happened over a month ago.



3. Favicons for shared links. When you share a link in Google Buzz, we now grab the favicon associated with that page so it's easier than ever to see the source (in this case, Blogger).



If you want to keep up with the latest on Buzz developments large and small, follow the team at buzz.google.com/googlebuzz.

Posted by Brian Stoler, Tech Lead, Google Buzz

1. Post by email. You can post buzz by emailing buzz@gmail.com — super handy for posting photos you take on your phone. Photos that you attach to your email will appear along with the subject line of your message. You can choose who can see posts you email into Buzz from the connected sites menu (click "Buzz," then "Connected Sites").



2. Prevent your boring chat status messages from being posted to Buzz. By default, your chat status messages are posted to Buzz and shared with your chat contacts. Don't want a boring message like "be right back" to turn into a Buzz post? Just put parentheses around it. If you don't want any of your chat status messages to get posted, you can always disconnect chat from the connected sites menu.



3. Look for the yellow line to see what's new. Can't figure out what's new on the Buzz tab? Posts and comments new since your last visit have a light yellow line along the left hand edge (if you're using a different theme the color may vary).



4. Link to a post. Each Buzz post has a permalink, so you can link to it. Click the down-arrow in the upper right-hand corner of a post, and select "Link to this post." Of course, you'lll only be able to see the posts you have access to.



5. Follow the Buzz team in Google Buzz. Visit buzz.google.com/googlebuzz and click "Follow Google Buzz" to get updates about what we're working on and send us your feedback.

Posted by John Costigan, Software Engineer

Now that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and we've rolled out the improvements we announced here over the weekend, we wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started:

1. Format your posts. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: *bold*, _italics_, or -strikethrough- all work.



2. View a summary of your own Buzz activity at www.google.com/dashboard. The Google Dashboard provides a private, consolidated summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as direct links to control your personal settings. As of today, Buzz has its own section on the Dashboard, so you can see how many people you're following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts, comments, and likes. You can also access your Buzz settings right there on the page.


3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone's inbox. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the "@" symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. Only you'll see their Gmail address — other people will just see their name.



4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz. Turn on keyboard shortcuts from Settings, and use "j" or "n" to scroll down the buzz tab, "k" or "p" to go back up, "r" to comment (same shortcut as reply in Gmail), and "shift + l" to like.

5. Mute posts so they don't get sent to your inbox. Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don't want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select "Mute this post."


If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, you can also mute buzz that appears in your inbox by hitting the "m" key while you're reading it.

Check out our Help Center for more tips and answers to your common questions, and stay tuned for more here as well.

Posted by Sarah Price, Online Operations Strategist

As part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we recently posted about how to pick a smart password. Having a strong password goes a long way in helping to protect your data, but there are a number of additional steps you can take to help you keep your Gmail account secure:

1. Remember to sign out. Especially when using a public computer, be careful to sign out of your Google account when you're finished. Just click the "Sign out" link at the top right corner of your inbox. If you're using a public or shared computer and want to be extra thorough, you can also clear the browser's cache, cookies and history. Then, completely close the browser. On your personal computer, you can also lock your computer with a password-protected screensaver if you need to step away momentarily. Learn the best ways to lock your screen in Windows or in Mac OS X. Forgot to sign out? Open up a new Gmail session on another computer and use Gmail's remote sign out feature to close any sessions that might still be open elsewhere.

2. Be careful about sending certain sensitive information via email. Once you send an email, you're no longer in control of the information it contains. The recipients, if they so choose, could forward the email or post its contents in a public place. Even if you know and trust the people you're emailing, that information may become exposed if their accounts become compromised or they get a virus on their machines. As a rule of thumb, should you need to provide a credit card number or financial account number to respond to a message, provide it over the phone or in person — not over email. And never share your password with anyone. Google does not email you to ask you for your password, your social security number, or other personal information — so don't send it!

3. Enable "Always use HTTPS." Any time you visit a webpage, your computer needs to send and receive information across the Internet. HTTPS is used to encrypt data as it is transmitted between computers on the Internet, so look for the "https" in the URL bar of your browser to indicate that the connection between your computer and Gmail's servers is encrypted. We use HTTPS on the Gmail login page, and you can choose to protect your entire Gmail session with HTTPS as well. HTTPS can make your mail slower, so we let you make the choice for yourself. Open Settings and choose "Always use HTTPS" on the General tab if you want to turn it on.

4. Be wary of unexpected attachments.To help protect you from viruses and malware, Gmail automatically scans every attachment when it's delivered to you, and again each time you open a message. Attachments you send are also scanned. That said, no system is foolproof, so if you happen to get an email from a friend with an attachment you didn't expect, don't be afraid to ask the sender what it is before you decide whether to open it.

5. Make sure your account recovery information is up-to-date. Your account recovery information helps you regain access to your account if you ever forget your password, or if someone gains access to your account without your permission. We currently offer several paths to account recovery. Every Gmail user must select a security question and answer — be sure to choose a combination that is easy for you to remember, but hard for others to guess or come across by investigating. Don't choose a question like "What is my favorite color?" as others may easily guess the answer. We also encourage you to provide a secondary email address and/or a mobile phone number, so we can send you a link to reset your password if you lose access to your account.

You can find additional security tips for Gmail in our Help Center. Learn more about protecting your computer, website, and personal information by checking out our security series on the Google blog or visiting http://www.staysafeonline.org.

Posted by Cristelle Blackford, Online Operations Strategist

Even the best of us forget our passwords from time to time. In fact, recovering passwords is one of the top reasons people visit the Gmail Help Center. To help with these situations, we recently added the ability to recover your password via text message.

To turn this on for your account, just sign in, select 'Change Password Recovery Options,' enter your cell phone number and click 'Save.'

Next time you forget your password, enter your username on the password-assistance page, and Google will text you a recovery code. No need to check another email account or even leave the page.

In general, it's a good idea to add as many password recovery options to your Google Account as possible, like a secondary email address and security question. And don't forget to keep them up-to-date.

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

If you got 100 new messages, how long would it take you to get through them all? An hour? Five minutes? How would you find the important ones, reply to the ones that require an immediate reply, and mark the ones that you needed to take care of later? Would you use stars, filters, keyboard shortcuts, labels? What about Gmail Labs like tasks or canned responses?

Everybody has their own system for managing email, but some are definitely more efficient than others. Even if you only get a few messages a day, there are probably some simple things you can do to make it easier to get through your inbox and maybe even have a little fun along the way. We know time is valuable, so we asked lots of Googlers for their tips and tricks on how they make the most of Gmail, and we combined the best of these into a guide at www.gmail.com/tips, cheekily entitled "Become a Gmail Ninja." The tips are categorized into ninja belts (white, green, black and master ) based on how much mail you get each day.



For a handy reference that you can pin to your wall or keep on your desk, we even made a printable version of the guide where all the tips fit on one page front and back. And for the first 1024 of you who want them, we'll send a limited-edition, laminated guide for free. Just fill out this form with your address. Sorry, we can only ship to addresses in the US. If you're not one of the lucky 1024, you can still buy a laminated guide at www.barcharts.com.



If you're already a Gmail ninja and have your own tips you'd like to share, let us know and we'll add the best ones to the online guide.

*Our lawyers asked us to make sure it was clear that your contact information won't be maintained longer than necessary to send you the laminated guide and that this offer is "void where prohibited and only while supplies last."

Update (11:59am): Well, that was fast. We've run out of the free laminated guides, but if you weren't part of the first 1024 people to sign up, you can still can buy them for $1.25 at www.barcharts.com/gmail.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Product Marketing Manager

It's that time of year when students are graduating, and in many cases getting yet another email address to check — an alumni account — as a graduation present.

Whether you have an alumni address, a work account, or your own domain that you like to use, rather than logging in and out of multiple accounts, you can set yourself up so all your mail ends up in your Gmail inbox. And you can send mail from any of the other addresses you own right from Gmail as well.

There are two steps to make this happen:

1. Set up mail forwarding or fetching
Many email providers offer free auto-forwarding to other accounts. Log into your non-Gmail account and set your Gmail address as the forwarding target. If your other account doesn't offer forwarding but supports POP3 access, you can use Mail Fetcher in Gmail to automatically check your other account for new mail and download it to Gmail.

2. Set up custom "From:"
Gmail's custom "From:" feature lets you send mail with one of your other email addresses listed as the sender in place of your Gmail address. There's a good step-by-step for how to set this up in the Help Center, but the basics are adding the address you want to use and then verifying that it belongs to you. Once you have your custom "From:" set up, you can pick which address you want to reply from in the "From:" address drop down while composing messages.

P.S. If you're a recent grad and want more tips on how to use Google during this transition period, check out the Google for Students Blog, where we'll be posting more tips like this weekly for the next couple months.

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

My friends email me all the time with ideas for improving Gmail. Just this weekend, my friend Dave said he wanted a way to select all of his messages with a certain label (like "urgent"). Two weeks ago, Adam came up with the idea of a button that would filter his inbox to only show unread items. Good ideas, but it turns out that doing stuff like this (and much more) is already possible using search operators.

For example, Dave would just need to search for "in:urgent" to get all items labeled "urgent," and Adam would just search for "is:unread in:inbox" to see all the unread messages in his inbox.

Here are a few other useful ways to filter your inbox:

• "to:me is:starred" shows all messages sent directly to you that are starred
  
• "is:chat from:heather" shows all chat conversations you had with Heather
  
• "is:starred -in:inbox" shows all your starred messages that aren't in your inbox (a good way to find anything important that you might have accidentally archived)
  
• "from:elliot filename:pdf" shows all messages from Elliot that have a pdf attachment

We've written about search operators here before, but lots of people find them hard to remember. That's why we built Search Autocomplete in Gmail Labs, designed to make searching in Gmail much easier. Instead of having to remember the exact syntax for advanced searches, you can just start typing, and search autocomplete will help you fill in the rest. If you find yourself doing some of the same searches over and over again, consider creating a permanent link to them using Quick Links in Labs.

Update (6/10): Revised the example about searching for a label to use "urgent" instead of "important."

Posted by Zach Geller, University Programs Specialist

A couple weeks back we launched Multiple Inboxes, an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that you can use to customize the different "inboxes" you see in one view when you log into Gmail.

If you forward all your work or school email to Gmail, you can use Multiple Inboxes to see your two accounts separately within the same browser window. Here's how:

1. Turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings.
2. Set up a filter to auto-archive all mail sent to your work or school address.
3. Customize one of your multiple inboxes to show mail sent to your other address. To do this, go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings and set up one of the panes to search for mail sent to your other address.



4. (Optional) Use a "custom from" address so that replies will be sent from Gmail but as if they're from your other account. This way, your coworkers or classmates won't know the difference.

I use Multiple Inboxes to keep track of email sent to my college alumni address which I forward to Gmail. I used to filter, label, and auto-archive all these messages (my alumni frisbee team listserve gets tons of mail), but found that I rarely looked at the relevant labels. Now with a separate "inbox" I can see them easily without cluttering my primary inbox.

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Gmail Product Marketing Manager

Update 8/2/2010: If you're using iPhone OS 4 or newer, archiving in Gmail will work once you go through the standard mail set up — no need to follow these instructions.

Pretty much everyone with an iPhone and a Gmail account has a preference for how to use the two together. Some people prefer the iPhone's built-in email client -- it's fast, syncs everything via IMAP, and works like the rest of the device. Others, myself included, can't live without search and threaded conversations and prefer to bring up Gmail in the browser. And a few people, for whom this tip is geared, read their mail via the client but switch to the browser-based version to clean out their inboxes so they can easily archive rather than delete.

See, the default Gmail set up for iPhone's built-in mail client configures things such that if you delete a message on your iPhone, it's sent to Gmail's Trash. That means in 30 days it's gone forever. Sure, you can archive by clicking the "Move to" button and then selecting "All Mail," but if you're an archive junkie and want mail you delete on your iPhone to get archived in Gmail instead, you just have to re-do the Gmail set up on your phone.

First, get rid of your default set up. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar. Find your Gmail account under "Accounts," click on it, scroll to the bottom, and click "Delete Account." Don't worry -- it'll be back and better than ever in a sec.

Then manually configure IMAP using the "Other" menu option by following the instructions this video (also available in the Gmail Help Center):



From then on, the iPhone's little trashcan icon will archive your mail. You might notice that messages you archive on your phone are actually being added to a new "Deleted Messages" label in your Gmail account -- but they're right in "All Mail" and searchable, just the way you want them.

Posted by Aseem Sood, Product Manager, Google Toolbar

Are you addicted to email? Do you keep Gmail open on your browser, constantly hitting refresh to get your latest messages?

If you're using Google Toolbar 5 for Internet Explorer (or Toolbar's Firefox version), you can add the Gmail custom button to make your life easier. With the Gmail button, you can get new message alerts, see previews of your mail and use Toolbar's search box to find any message no matter what page you're on.


Google Toolbar also has a "Send to" feature: when you click on the "Send to" icon, a Gmail compose window opens that automatically includes a link to the page you're currently on and any text you have highlighted on that page. This makes it easy to email your friends interesting pages you come across as you browse the web.


Plus, you can also add Google gadgets to your Toolbar to bring your favorite websites and online services closer to you. One of my favorites is the Google Calendar gadget: by clicking on the calendar icon, I can check out my schedule for the next few days and even add events.

To try out these gadgets for yourself, check out Toolbar's gallery.

Posted by Jon Kotker, Gmail engineering intern, Summer 2008

I often send messages where the subject is the entire message (e.g. "Want to grab lunch at 12:30?"), and Gmail would always prompt me to add in body text.


Now, however, you can add "EOM" or "(EOM)" at the end of the subject line (short for End Of Message), and Gmail will silently send the message without the unnecessary prompt.

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Gmail Product Marketing Manager

First, if you don't have Gmail keyboard shortcuts enabled, turn them on in Settings. You'll be glad you did. If you spend a lot of time in Gmail, you'll start shaving milliseconds of every action, which adds up. Get through a hundred or so messages every day and you'll end up with extra minutes each week to read your favorite blogs in Reader -- using Reader's keyboard shortcuts of course.

Here's how I read my mail:

1. Log in.
If I'm on my own computer I don't even have to do this, since I have the "Remember me on this computer" option checked on the Gmail homepage.








2. Get rid of stuff I obviously don't need to read.
I scan the senders and subjects of unread messages in my inbox, navigate through the messages using k to move the cursor (little black triangle) upwards and j to move it back down.











As I'm moving around, I select all of the messages I haven't already filtered but don't need to read using x.











And archive them all with y (e works for this too). Now I just have the messages I should read.

3. Get through the mail I do need to read.
I find a message that looks important or interesting, and open it using the enter key. If I need to reply, I hit r. Reply all? That's a. Once my response is ready to go, tab + enter sends it on its way. Back to my inbox with g + i. More navigating around with j and k, selecting with enter. Archiving (y) and replying (r). Starring some stuff for later (s). The occasional forward (f). Sending with tab + enter.

It may seem like a lot to remember, but for me, these eleven shortcuts have been invaluable and aside from j and k, which I just had to practice, pretty intuitive (g + i? that's for "goto inbox"). If you ever need a quick refresher, hit ? anytime to see the shortcut reference guide. And if you don't like any of them, you can edit the defaults and define your own by enabling Custom keyboard shortcuts in Labs.