The Tech Bookshelf

Gmail has been around for a couple of years and used to be by invitation only. In recent months it was opened up for the general public, meaning anyone can sign up for a free account. When GMail first came out, the big deal was that they offered 2 GB storage for your emails. There were also some features that many thought were a little weird, like tags instead of folders. But as a person who has been using it for two year will tell you, it really works and works well.

Free Email, What's the Catch?

Gmail is free, as are most online email providers like Yahoo and Hotmail. The catch you have to put up with advertising. But wait, it's not flashing banners or anything you have to click on before reading your mail. Google very smartly decided to make the ad's small and out of your field of vision. They appear on the right side of the screen as a sidebar to your email. As said, there are no flashing banners that take up half the screen, just simple little 3 line ads.

 

I know that a lot of companies offer free email accounts and give you a lot of advertising. Google has a different philosophy when it comes to those adds though. So that Google can offer you free email with adds, but still not turn you off with big flashy advertisements, they try to target the ads to you. How do they accomplish this? By reading your email. WHAT you might say. You don't want anyone reading your email! Relax, the Google search servers simply look for keywords in your emails and put up relevant ads based on those keywords. They are not truly reading and archiving away your emails. And the Advertisers do not know what your email was about either. This method of targeted ads seems to work out well though as Google is able to offer large amounts of storage for free.

To get a free google email account, simply go to mail.google.com and click "Sign up for Gmail".

2GB Plus Storage

One of the features of Gmail that everyone loves is that it offers ever growing storage of your email. At the time of this posting, Gmail was giving me 2,874MB of storage for my email. (Update: I am now getting 7.5 GB of storage) To give you some idea of how much storage that is, I have 1,103 emails archived and 120 of those have attachments.

I am st ill only using 79 MB which is only 2% of the space provided. But Google offers this email space on a growing capacity. When I first signed up for Gmail 2 years ago, I was given 2,300 MB of storage space. Which means in the last two years Google has provided me an additional 1/2 Gigabyte of storage!

Google likes to tell you that you never have to throw any email away with their "unlimited storage" and this is true. We will touch on what Google calls archiving later. But sometimes you really don't want to hang onto an email. So while it's true you can save every email you have ever received, it may not be necessary.

Organization

Labels

The web 2.0 boom as it has been called started a number of trends that website designers have implemented into their architecture. Of these, using labels instead of folders. Let me try to elaborate what labels does for you. Labels are basically a way to categorize emails by commonality, as apposed to the old email method of folders which purpose was to file the email away and get it out of your inbox.

 

Think of the two methods like this: you have a bunch of papers on your desk that you need to get off your desk. 1) Using folders you can take each piece of paper and file it under a single common thought with several other emails. When you need to see that paper, you open the folder and look through the folder until you find the paper. This works, but how do you group papers together into multiple categories when they each have various themes? 2) With labels, you can apply paper into several different categories. So think of it as a way of creating an Index for everything. Then you simply take the paper off your desk and put it into a number location where it can be found. Did I confuse anyone? Well let me tell you why this is useful.

Labels come in extremely handy for those email that have multiple topics and can be categorized many ways. For example, lets say you and your family are planning an upcoming trip to Disney World. And on your way, you are going to stop by and visit your cousin who lives in Atlanta. You get an email from your Cousin Bob and in the email, it contains directions to his house and pictures of his kid. You cousin also includes in the email links to various Disney World attractions he thinks you should see. In the traditional email work flow, you could put the email in a folder marked Disney World. When you are preparing for the trip, you click on the Disney World folder and you see all the emails about the Magic Kingdom. But what happens 6 months down the road when you want to see those pictures of your cousins kids and the Disney trip has long since passed.

With Gmail, you can apply as many labels as you want to an email. So you could apply one label called Disn ey World and one label called Family. Now the email is easily findable no matter where you look. You will see just how handy this can be in the section entitled "Searching Your Emails".

 

Applying Labels

Applying a label is simple.

1. Click on an email to view it
2. Select the drop down list box above the email that says "More Actions..."
3. Scroll down until you find the label you want to apply and select it
4. Do this multiple times until you have applied all the labels you wish

 

Or to apply a label to multiple emails

1. When viewing the subject of multiple emails, select the check box next to the emails you want to apply a label to
2. Repeat steps 2-4 above as many times as necessary

To create a new label and apply it to an email

1. Follow step 1-2 from one of the above two methods
2. Scroll down all the way to the bottom and select "New Label"
3. Give the label an appropriate name

From the picture at the right you can easily see what labels have been applied to an email. The labels appear in Green next to the subject of the email. Google's help page on labels can give you more information.

Archiving Emails

Archiving emails simply means remove them from your inbox. It doesn't mean that emails are discarded, it simply takes the email off your desk and puts it into a general holding area that you can later access when needed.

 

To Archive an Email

1. Click on the email to read it, or select the check box beside the email in the inbox
2. Click Archive

The email is magically whisked out of your inbox into the general category "All Mail". If you labeled the email it shows up under any label categories you have. But the point is it no longer clutters up your inbox. And as mentioned in the "2GB Plus Storage" section, you don't need to worry about running out of space. So you can archive every email if you wish.

The Conversation is King

Don't you hate it when you are in a long, involved email thread (fancy word for string of emails) that has many party's involved. When you try to go through the list and see what everyone says, it's sometimes hard to tell where one response starts and another ends. Well Gmail has come up with a better solution to this. Its a little hard to explain but here goes: simply put, Gmail breaks out every reply into a clearly defined conversation. Pictures speak louder than words, so take a gander at the picture below.

Pretty slick. And if you want to see one of the snippets from the email sting, simply click on the person's name.

Searching Your Email

Google is known for it's search engine. That is it's bread and butter and how it makes all it's money. Gmail is no exception to Google's rule. Gmail has a very powerful search engine that allows you to find any email you may ave archived years and years back. The scenarios are too numerous to count so I will give you a few examples:

Lets say you want to find an email from your Aunt Sylvia.

Or an email to Aunt Sylvia

An email from last week/month/year

Or an email sent in September last year

You get the point. Google has a great number of help pages on all the searches you can perform with Gmail.