Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a multi-part post detailing various features you can use to improve your productivity by using Gmail. If you haven’t read Part 1, you may want to start at the beginning.

In Part 1, we talked about filters and labels and how we can use them or organize incoming mail, as well as some additional functionality we can use by enabling the canned response feature in the labs section. In this part, we’re going to go over some more of the standard features Gmail has to offer as well as some more features available in labs.

First of all, head to your settings and take a look at the Accounts tab. One thing I’ve done with the settings in this tab is used one central email accounts as a sort of operator for all of my various accounts. For example, I have several domain names and various email addresses with each of those domains, but I don’t really want to check those accounts manually. For some of them, I’d like to be able to respond from them or at least keep my affiliation with that domain. For others, I’d like to get people to stop sending email to me there and direct them elsewhere. This is fairly easy to do with Gmail.

For each account I own, I have gone into my domain web host settings and forwarded my email address to my central Gmail account. Then I can easily go in and add this account in the Accounts tab in my settings and wait for the confirmation email, click on the appropriate link, etc. By default, I have set my settings to reply as the account to which an email was sent. This sometimes works seamlessly but on some mail clients the recipient will see the message as having been sent “on behalf of” whatever@domain.com rather than just whatever@domain.com itself. This doesn’t really bother me, so I don’t sweat it. If you don’t like this, you may want to look at other options. Anyway, on some of my accounts, I don’t really want people sending mail there anymore. In these cases, I have set my reply address as something else, which is also a part of the settings. It is all relatively easy to set up but if you need more info, I’d be glad to create an in-depth guide on this.

You can also use the Accounts tab to download mail from other address by using POP3, but this isn’t something I do at the moment. Something I do use, though, is keyboard shortcuts. If you’re going to use Gmail as your primary email interface, I’d highly suggest using these. They’re pretty easy to get running – just enable the options in your settings under the General tab. From there, you can use the default hotkeys or you can use customized ones if you enable the Custom Keyboard Shortcuts option under the Labs tab. I recommend this, if just to get the extra Keyboard Shortcut tab under Settings which allows you to easily view and change your shortcuts within the settings menu.

There is one more issue I’d like to touch on quickly today, and that is the issue of previews inside of an email. There are 4 options in Labs which allow YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews in your emails. I don’t have a lot to say about this other than why open something if you can already see it? I’d rather not have to click on a link to see what may be on the page, especially when email is involved. These options just make things a little bit more convenient and make getting through emails a little quicker and more pleasant.

Go on to Part 3 or subscribe now.