ItsA2Z

Attachment Alerter: Never Forget an Attachment

When you are sending emails in a hurry you may forget to send attachments. It will look unprofessional when you are sending a very important business related email and forgot the attachment.
The cure is Gmail’s Attach Alerter. If you have the word ‘attach’ in the mail content, and did not attach anything, you will be alerted by Gmail before sending that email.  To enable this feature, do the following.

• Click on “Settings” link,
• Click on “Labs” tab,
• Select “Enable” option button in “Forgotten Attachment Detector”
• Click on “Save Changes” at the bottom

Forwarding All Emails Automatically

If you wanted to forward all emails to another account you can do the following.

• Click on Settings link
• Click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
• Click on the radio button “Forward a copy of incoming mail to”, and then give an email id in the text box.

You also have the option of deciding what to do with the emails in the original account after forwarding it. Following are the three options available.

• Keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox
• Archive Gmail’s copy
• Delete Gmail’s copy

Now all the mails will be forwarded to the specified email id.

Searching in Gmail

Since search and indexing is the core business of Google, there is no surprise that Gmail’s search feature works like a charm. The search will bring you the relevant email very fast every single time.

Search All Emails

Entering search word in Gmail search box will search for all the messages including chat messages, emails in sent, drafts, inbox and all the messages that are archived and labeled.

Searching Emails in Particular Folders

“Searchtext in:foldername” will search for the given text in the specific folder which you specified.  For example, following will search for keyword geek in the Sent Folder.
Tips in:sent

Search Specific Type of Messages

Types of messages in Gmail

• Starred – messages which are Considered as an important
• Unread – messages which are unread
• read – messages which are read
• chat – Conversation messages

“is:starred”, “is:unread”, “is:read” and “is:chat” will search for the messages that are starred, unread, read and chat messages respectively.
For Example, the following will give you the list of starred messages in Inbox folder.

in:inbox is:starred

Use OR Operator

You can search messages based on either-or condition. For example, following search gives the message which has ramesh as recipient or sender, after 2009/01/01

from:sekhar OR to:sekhar after:2011/10/05
from:sekhar | to:sekhar after:2011/10/05

Note: OR is case sensitive and must be in upper case.

Advanced Gmail Search

You can also use advanced options in search by clicking ‘Show search option’ that is located next to the Gmail search box. Advanced search provides search based on the following:

• from – specify sender
• to – specify recipient
• subject – search words in subject
• Folder – Folder to search
• Include and Exclude the search words
• Message has/hasn’t attachment
• Age of the message

How to Attach an Executable (exe file) in Gmail

You cannot attach an executable file like a normal file.  Gmail will display the error message –  “FILE is an executable file. For security reasons, Gmail does not allow you to send this type of file”.
To overcome this issue, do the following as a sender of the email.

• Rename the file without an exe extension,
• Compress it with any compression utility and then attach it.

Now it will get attached, and uploaded successfully. The receiver of the email should uncompress the attachment and rename it again with exe extension.

Sending emails to Group / Alias

You can group the list of email addresses into a single entity.

• Click on “Contacts” link,
• Click on “+icon” (New Group) and give a name to the New group.
• Now you can add new contact to this group or you can move the existing contact to this group.

When you want to send mails to a group, in the To field of the compose box, type the few letters of group name, auto-complete feature will suggest list of group names that matched your word. You can choose from the list and sending mail to the groups.

Managing Multiple Gmail Accounts

Checking all emails

You could be having multiple Gmail accounts for various reasons. But it becomes tedious while checking mail that, you would want to logout and login to each account and check mails in different accounts. This can be done easily, by forwarding all mails from all accounts to a single account.

Sending emails as another Gmail account

Follow the steps below to send emails from other accounts. i.e From x@gmail.com, you can send emails as y@gmail.com

1. Login to x@gmail.com, go to  Settings -> Accounts Tab -> “Send Email As” Section.
2. Add y@gmail.com account here and confirm that this is your email by following the instruction.
3. Now you can start sending emails as y@gmail.com from x@gmail.com.

Last Login Details for Security Purpose

If you are suspecting somebody else is accessing and hacking into your Gmail account, Gmail provides ‘Last Account Activity’ feature that shows five recent activities in your Gmail account.

• Click on ‘Details’ link in Last account activity line at the bottom of your Gmail page.

Recent activity information includes, Access Type (Browser or from some mobile device etc), IP address from which the access was made and Date/Time of access.
If your Gmail account is currently being accessed from other location, ‘Last Account Activity Detail’ will show the details of other access in ‘Concurrent Session Information’ Table.
You can even sign-out all the other sessions except current session by clicking ‘Sign out all other sessions’