Hello everyone,
Have you ever felt tired about the tons of emails you receive every day? Especially those commercials from the brands that you don’t even remember when you gave out your email address. What’s worse, those important emails were buried among your email ocean and didn’t get your timely attention.
Gmail offers a bunch of functions that you may not know about. I would like to share some of them with you.
Basic tools:
1.Filter emails.
Do you want Gmail automatically delete some emails for you or put them somewhere?
Here is how to do it:
Open an email that you want to add tag on, click the “more” button (the one next to “reply” button)
Choose “Filter messages like this” and you will see the window below:
Here, you can specify the email address, subject, and keywords of those emails that you want to filter. Click on “create filter with this search.” You will see this :
Check it out, now you can make Gmail automatically do many operations for you. Choose what you want and click “create filter,” your filter will be created successfully!
2. Tag management
You might be familiar with “star” tool, with which you can mark your important emails.
You may not know that you can use TAG to manage ALL your emails.
You can add multiple tags on certain kind of emails with different colors. So you can recognize different email categories easily, and you can view all emails with certain tag.
Just like this:
Here is how to do it:
•When viewing your Inbox, select the checkbox next to those messages, click the Labels button, and click the label you want. (Or check the boxes next to several labels and click Apply.)
Right on the left of the “Label” button, there is the “move to” button, which allows you to archive your emails into different folders. So you could click on certain tag on the left side to open certain category.
•When viewing a message, click the Labels button to add a label to the message. More amazingly, you can also click and drag a label from the left side and drop it on the message!
•Now, you can add different colors for different tags. Click the little arrow next to the tag on the left. So when your email comes, it will show like the picture above.
3.Archive & Spam report
Gmail provides you a lot free space to store anything you want. The emails in your spam box will be removed permanently after 30 days, while those emails you archived will be stored permanently.
Click this “archive” button 
, and the email will be moved to “All Mail.” Thus, you can leave those old emails there without sorting out them. Every time you need anything, just search inside “All Mail.”
After you report spam 
, Gmail will quickly start to block similar emails. The more you report, the more efficient and accurate Gmail will become. So make a contribution and let more people avoid spam!
4.General tips
You can do almost anything you want with Gmail’s settings. Most people are familiar with these in general settings: Add personal picture, personal signature, vacation responder, and so on.
But there are some settings which are very useful but are often ignored by most of people.
One of them is “personal level indicators”
By showing indicators, you could immediately tell whether the email is sent to only you.
5.Go to check the Gmail Lab, it is awesome!
All the functions above are very basic and general. Gmail Labs allows you to try out experimental new features in Gmail.
Open your Gmail setting, click on “Labs” on the top menu.
Check it out; there are so many new functions for you to try!
Many of them are really cool!
You could view information on Youtube, Picasa, and Yelp through Gmail;
You could make your task list and put emails in the list, and access your task list through your smartphone;
You could send text message to your friend’s cellphone with Gmail!
There are too many functions to count.
When you try functions in labs. Keep this in mind:
•They may break at any time.
•Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently.
•They may work so well that they graduate and become regular features.
When you are having fun with those new functions, you also helped improving Gmail.
Go and mess around with your Gmail today!
