Do you know why Google’s Gmail is perfectly customizable?

Techie, the whiz kid, guides you through technology on: Do you know why Google’s Gmail is perfectly customizable?

Google’s Gmail is one of the best free email available in today’s date. Although at times you may encounter some minor hiccups in the newer version, Gmail can be customized according to your needs. And Google is dedicatedly working for further improvements even when most of you are oblivious of its fantastic features. You can actually make Google’s Gmail perfectly customizable.

Now why do I say Gmail is perfectly customizable? Because Gmail has wonderful flexible features that can be exploited to suit different needs. Let’s check out some of these outstanding but little-known features to see how you can perfectly customize Google’s Gmail.

You can customize Gmail inbox with Labels: This is a great way to filter your incoming messages. Click on Settings and then on Filter. At the bottom you will find ‘Create a new Filter’. Say, you want all your ‘myspace’ messages to be organized outside your Inbox. So, under ‘From’ put in ‘myspace’ and go to the next step. Tick ‘Skip the Inbox (Archive it)’. Next, tick ‘Apply Label’ and create a new label called ‘myspace’. Finally, click on ‘Create Filter’ and apply it to all the previous emails you have received from ‘myspace’. The next time you open your inbox, you will find all your messages from ‘myspace’ under Labels.

‘Labels’ is a very useful way to quickly get to mails that you regularly receive from certain friends or networks. You can find the ‘Labels’ tab under Settings.

You can customize Gmail to manage multiple email accounts: Did you know you could use Gmail to send messages from your other email addresses? You do not have to leave Gmail and go to Yahoo mail, for instance, to send a message from there. You can do it from Gmail itself. This feature makes it easier to manage multiple accounts from the Gmail interface.

Click Settings along the top of any page, and open the ‘Accounts’ tab. Under ‘Send mail as’, click ‘Add another email address’. In the ‘Name’ field, enter your full name. In the ‘Email address’ field, enter the mail address you would like to send from.

When someone replies to your message using a custom ‘From:’ address, the reply will be delivered to the ‘From:’ address rather than your Gmail address. If you want replies to be delivered to Gmail or a third account, you will need to enter a ‘reply-to’ address. To do this, click ‘Specify a different reply-to address’ and enter the desired email address.

Click Next Step and then click Send Verification. Gmail will send a verification message to your other email address to confirm that you own it.

Open your other account and either click the link in the message Gmail sent you or enter the confirmation code in the Accounts section of your Gmail settings.

You can customize Gmail to setup POP3: To be able to receive your mails from Gmail in Outlook or Outlook Express, you will have to enable this by going to Settings and clicking on ‘Forwarding POP/IMAP’. Enable the relevant parts. You will find the Outlook and Outlook Express configuration instructions on this page too.

You can customize Gmail with new features from Lab: What is in the Lab? When you log in to your Gmail account, you can find a blue icon. Click on it. Among the new features introduced are:

• A quick-link tool that lets you bookmark specific Gmail messages. It adds a box to the left column that gives you one-click access to anything that you have bookmarked in Gmail. You can also use it for saving searches and important messages.
• You could always put a star on a mail, but now you can insert Superstars, by successive clicks of the mouse.
• The ‘e-mail addict’ tool that lets you lock yourself out of your email account for 15 minutes.
• A fixed-width font option view adds a dropdown menu that lets you view a message in a fixed width font.
• Mouse gestures that let you take actions based on mouse movements. However, this works best in Windows. Don’t try it on a Mac.
• A ‘Signature tweak’ and a ‘Quoted signature’. The first lets you put a signature above the quoted reply and the second puts quotations at random. However, you cannot use both at the same time
• The option to upload your picture so that people can see who they are chatting with.

Now, do you know why I say Google’s Gmail is perfectly customizable? But as Gmail is still in its Beta, you may come across some ‘errors’ at times, if you are using the ‘New version’. When you face any problems like this, you can always switch over to ‘Older version’ (on the top right corner), which is flawless.

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