Looking for gmail tips and tricks? Or need help with gmail? We have a list of simple and useful tips for you to stay highly productive on worlds best email application.

This list contains gmail organization tips, gmail filter tips and other gmail productivity tips.

There are millions of users, who use email for their personal and professional communications. An email account at times could be called as your online identity. Of all the email services, Gmail is called the most popular choice for web users. It has the maximum amount of active users.

Gmail has a number of features, which help its users while working with it. However, a majority of its users still are not aware of these features.

Below is the list of 10 simple tricks, which can help you in improving your Gmail productivity.

1. Managing your To-Do list or tasks

This feature help the users to create notes, set deadlines, add any message. In order to start using it, you need to click over the drop down menu located just beside the Gmail (above the compose button located at the left side). After clicking, you need to select ‘Tasks’, which will give you a popup window like the way you see in Gtalk. The more you explore this feature the smarter you become in your Gmail productivity.

2. Using different keyboard shortcuts

Using different shortcuts could really help you in saving loads of your time while working with Gmail in the same way when you work with these over your Windows based PC. For instance, to compose a new email you can use c, to search you can use /, e is for archive, m for mute, etc. You can access the complete list from Google support web page.

3. Use Labels to categorize your emails

The feature of Labels helps you in categorizing your email messages in your inbox. This reduces your load when you want to find out any specific email message. For instance, if you are using a single Gmail account for your business and personal purposes then by categorizing the emails using labels with Business and Home could help you in sorting out your emails.

4. Unsubscribing all the unwanted emails

You could be getting a number of emails from different marketers updating different business deals, which you may not be interested to check. You could get rid of these by marking the particular email you want to unsubscribe from the link given inside the email message. It will give you a dialog box confirming to unsubscribe and put in the spam. However, if you have too many emails from many people here is a smarter way to unsubscribe from all the newsletters, marketing emails,and other spam you do not want to see in your inbox

1. In Gmail search box, do a search for “newsletter OR opt out OR unsubscribe OR email preferences OR subscribed“
2. Select (checkbox) the emails you want to unsubscribe from Click “More” -> “Create Filter”
3. Click “Create filter with this search”
4. Select “Skip the inbox”
5. Select “Never mark it as important”
6. “Apply label: JUNK” This way your inbox is cleaner and you can always check back on JUNK tag email if you need.

5. Drop the attachment files straight to compose mail window

Attaching any file to your mail box is usually a tedious job, however, at Gmail you can do it by simply dragging and dropping it over the compose mail window unlike the way you do it over your windows based PC.

6. Undo the sent mails

If you have mailed something and immediately realize it is going to a wrong person or a mail with wrong content is moved out, don’t worry, you have the rescue in Gmail. There is a button of undo, which you need to enable from settings page of Gmail, once you do it, you can undo any sent email immediately after pressing the send button.

7. Consolidate your multiple email accounts into a single Gmail account

If you have multiple email accounts to manage, Gmail gives you the facility to control them all from one Gmail account by combining them together. All you need to do is to go to the setting page, check the Accounts and Import page and select ‘Send mail from other addresses’ or select the option ‘Add POP 3 email account and then simply do as per the upcoming instructions to enable this feature. In this way you can access different email accounts from a single Gmail account.

8. Create & edit filters

Filters are considered as a powerful tool which helps you in instructing Gmail what you simply want to do with the messages as they reach your inbox. Creating them is an easy task, which will help you in sorting, forwarding, labeling and even deleting the email messages.

9. Background Send

If you have typed a huge email message and want to send them out with multiple attachments to a large number of people then it could prove out to be a tedious job. However, by enabling the feature called Background Send (found inside the labs), you could do this job at the background while doing other work at your PC simultaneously.

10. Desktop notifications

With this feature of Gmail, you get the notifications of any of the new incoming email or instant chat messages. This feature only works over Google Chrome, which could be enabled by going inside the settings.

11. Managing Contacts

This feature help the users to manage contacts. In order to start using it, you need to click over the drop down menu located beside the Gmail (above the compose button located at the left side). Some of the features on this gmail contacts that I really love are listed below

1. Mobile Sync – You can easily sync it on any smartphone, and the sync works both ways. I use it on my andreoid device and the sync is seamless and very fast. Another advantage of using mobile sync feature is backup of your contacts. In case you switch device or lost it your contacts will be easily synced up in new device using.
2. Contact Merge Feature – There are times I have duplicate contacts of people e.g. one contact with email address and other with phone only. You can easily merge these contacts into one by below simple steps
• Go to contacts screen
• Select the two contacts you want to merge
• Click “More” -> “Merge Contacts”

12. Special Search Features

The gmail search box is really powerful and some keywords in search box can be used to do really fast search for you.

Finding Email with Attachments

Lets say you want to find email containing documents as attachments, you can type this in search box

has documents

Similar to this there are also more option with “has” keyword (e.g. has videos, has photos, has calendar event). To see those you can type “has” (without quotes) in search box and options will show up.

Lets say, you want to find a email with PDF attachment. This is how you can find it quickly

has:attachment filename:pdf

In case you are looking for email with a word document, this is how you can find it quickly

has:attachment filename:doc

These options can be combined with the regular label search options, e.g.

has:attachment label:sent

This will search for all attachment emails that you have sent. Feel free to play around with and explore the power of gmail.

13. How To Make You Gmail Highly Secure

The best way to enable tight security on your gmail is to have two factor authentication.
You can enable this on google accounts settings.
This is a recommended security measure if you are using your gmail account for any sensitive information exchange including financial, social security or any other documents and details that may be sensitive.

Make sure to also get the google authenticator app on your mobile device for easy access anywhere.

Google Authenticator on android

Google authenticator on iOS devices

Final word

Gmail is among the most popular email services being used by millions of users all across the world. Unfortunately, most of its users are still unaware about these features, which can increase their productivity over Gmail. Trying the above tips and tricks can help you in boosting up Gmail productivity.

Do you know of any tricks that we missed out? Feel free to share in comments.