Master Gmail: Organize, Automate, and Work Faster (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Whether you're a seasoned Gmail user, brand new, or always wanted to get around to learning about more features, you are in the right place. My name is Jess Stratton, and there is something for every level of user in this Gmail tutorial. Let's go. Here's a quick overview of the interface. On the left-hand side is the navigation bar. Anywhere you hover your mouse and you see three dots, you can click on that to open up a larger menu. Anywhere you see a down triangle like this one, you can click on it to expand a menu. Click the blue compose button to create an email. If you don't want to see this menu, you can hide it at any time by clicking the three horizontal lines on the top left-hand side of the screen. You can always hover your mouse over the menu, and it'll pop right back out again, including the compose button. All the way on the top right-hand side of the screen, you can click this grid icon to hop around between any other Google product that you have access to. You can click your avatar icon to switch back and forth between multiple Google accounts. And here's where you can also add another account. This is useful if you have a personal account and a work or school Google Workspace account. We also have the quick access toolbar here on the right. This lets you access other Google products quickly and or integrate them with your emails. Here's Google Calendar, Google Keep, a note-taking app, Tasks, Contacts, and you can click the plus sign to add any other Google add-ons, such as Trello. You can hide or show this at any time by clicking the arrow on the very bottom right-hand side to toggle the side panel on or off. Some things can be done right from this message list. I'll open Google Tasks and drag in this message. I can change the title, and I could add a due date if I wanted to, which will show up on my Google Calendar. Some emails need to be opened to use the quick access bar. I'll open up this email like I'm reading it. I'll open the calendar. I'll go to tomorrow, and when I click inside the calendar, it's going to add the subject line from this email. I'll save it and close out of this. I can click this back arrow to go back to my inbox. And finally, this is some good information. I want to store this later, so I'll click Google Keep, click take a note, and remind myself why I want to keep this. And again, I'll click to go back to my inbox. You can change the way you look at your mail depending on how you like to work. Gmail defaults to this tabbed interface to sort your mail into primary emails, that is important and person-to-person emails, promotions like junk mail and newsletters, social emails from social networks, and my personal favorite that doesn't appear by default called updates, which contains things like purchase and package tracking, online ticketing, hotel reservations, even Google security alerts. If you want to get this updates tab, click the gear icon on the top right-hand side of the screen. Scroll to inbox type. There are some other things that you can change, for example, if you only want to see your unread first, your starred messages first, and I'll go over that. You can even add multiple inboxes to your Gmail. But I'm going to click on customize. Here is where I can click to add that updates tab. Click save, and the tab will appear immediately. If I click into the updates tab, I can see that all of my mail has been moved into that tab. If I refresh my inbox, it leaves my primary tab nice and clean and only the mail that I'm really interested in. Do note that if you only want to do purchase tracking, you can do that with this new purchases view on the left-hand side. Clicking that view will bring you into a special view that contains only purchases that you've made so that you can do all of your package tracking that way. At any time, click back on inbox to get back to this tabbed interface. If you see a message that appears to be in the wrong tab, for example, this email here looks like it should be in the primary tab instead of updates, you can manually drag it to the tab you want. I'll drag it over to primary and let go with the mouse when it's over it. You're given the option to do this every time. I can click yes or I can just ignore this box if I only want to do this once and eventually that pop-up will go away. Now my message is in the right tab. Let's compose a message. I'll click the blue compose button on the top left-hand side of the screen. In the to field, type in the first few characters of the person or email address that you're trying to send the message to. If it's someone you've conversed with before, Gmail may be able to populate that field for you. You can also click CC carbon copy to send a copy of the email to someone else or BCC, which is blind carbon copy, to send a copy of the email without the recipient being aware of it. These fields are optional. Type your subject line. And now click your email in the body field to start typing your email. I'm sending this one on behalf of my fictional character, Marcy Cho. Down at the bottom of the screen, you can click the font icon to apply complex formatting to the email, like changing the font, adding headers, bold-facing text, or creating numbered or bulleted lists. I'm going to show you how to use attachments in a bit, but you can also click the three dots all the way on the right-hand side to do more actions, like spell check, or use a neat feature to help schedule a meeting by proposing some times that you're free. It's outside the scope of this tutorial, but play around with this. It's a great time-saver to prevent that back-and-forth communication of choosing a time for a meeting. When you first create a new message, Gmail will save it as a draft. If you decide you don't want to send the email at all, you can click the trash can to discard the draft. If you want to continue to work on it later, you can always just click the X to close out of the email. You can find it later in the draft section on the left-hand side. Here, we now have the number one beside that because there's an email in there. I'll click on drafts, click on my email to open it up and continue working on it. If you do prefer working with a larger screen, you can always click these two arrows to pop out this into a much bigger window to work with. But for now, this is all done, so I'm going to send it. You can send this immediately by clicking the big blue send button, or you can click the down arrow to the right of this to schedule it to send it later. This is useful if you're sending work emails over the weekend or to somebody else in a different time zone. This way, it hits their inbox at a time when you know they'll be most able to see it immediately. You can use any of these three suggestions that it gives you, or you can click pick a date and time and choose when you want it to send. I can select day, and I can type in the time. I'll click schedule send, and off it goes. It's telling me that it's scheduled. I can click it anytime to go back to my inbox. It's easy to identify messages that have attachments because you can see the icons directly in this message list. I'm going to click right on this email. I can see the attachment at the bottom of the screen. I can click on it once, and it's going to open up, if it can, directly in Gmail. But if I hover my mouse over this attachment, I get some options. I can click to download it directly to my computer. I can add it to Google Drive. And finally, I can edit it with Google Docs. Though this may or may not work for you, it depends on what kind of attachment it is. In this case, it's a Word document, so Google Docs would be able to open it with no problems. I'll click this arrow to go back to my inbox. Let's send some attachments. I'll click compose and put the cursor in the body of the email. There's a few ways to send attachments. The first way is by clicking the paperclip icon. This is going to allow me to directly choose something from my computer. I'm on a Mac right now, but the process is similar if you're using Windows. It's just the same browse dialog box. I'll choose a PDF file and click open. It shows up at the bottom of the email, including the file size. If I decide I don't want to include this, or I chose the wrong one by mistake, I can click the X to remove it. I can also choose to insert a photo. If I click insert photo, I can directly upload one from Google Photos that I already have. I can click upload to upload one from my computer. In this case, I'll click browse. It's going to bring me to the same screen that we just saw, except this time it's grayed everything out that's not an image file. So I'll click an image, click open, and it inserts it directly into my email. This is an inline attachment. It's not an actual file. This time you can see the photo. If I click on that photo, I have some options. I can resize it. For example, I'll choose small. It's going to make it a much smaller version in the email. Now something else that I can do is hit the enter key to move on to a new line. This is the best way to say something about this image. I can also click the image button again and insert another photo. These images are going to be placed in line, and anybody reading the email will see it exactly as I've laid it out here. If I decide I don't want this image, I can select it again and click remove. Finally, I can choose to insert a file using Google Drive. This is going to show me anything that I already have in Google Drive, and I can also click upload to upload something new. Now this may happen to you automatically. I'm going to click to attach a file. I'm going to choose something different. I'll click open and watch what happens. It's telling me that this is too big to send as an attachment because it's larger than 25 megabytes. It's saying that it's going to be automatically uploaded to Google Drive. I'll click okay, got it. Depending on your internet speed, it's going to take a few moments to upload, and here it is. Another person will get a link to download this, so it's perfectly okay if you get this warning. It's just telling you that the file is too big to send as a regular attachment. I'm going to discard this draft and not send it at all. If you frequently send the same response to emails, you can save it as a template. This feature must be enabled to use. Click the gear icon, then choose see all settings. Go to the advanced tab. Make sure templates is set to enable, and then be sure to click save changes down at the bottom. Compose a new email and set up the subject line in the body of your email to contain the content you want to send. Down at the bottom of the email, click the three dots under more options, and you'll have a new item called templates. Hover your mouse over save draft as template, and then choose save as new template. Give your template a name or it defaults to the subject line. I'll click save, and now you can click the trash can icon. We are all done with this draft. I'm going to open up this email. I'll click reply, and let's use our new template. I'll click the three dots, hover my mouse over templates, and select this event is sold out. It inserts the reply, and now all I have to do is click on send. Let's create a signature file to append text to the bottom of every email that we send out. I'll click the gear icon, and then choose see all settings. If I scroll down about three quarters of that page, I'll see the signature area. From here, I'll click create new. The first thing I need to do is give my signature a name. I can call it anything I want. It's really only important if you have multiple signatures. In this case, I'll click create, and over here on the right hand side, I can create the body of my signature. This is my fictional character, Marcy. She can be whoever she wants to be. From here, I can take this text, and I can format it any way that I want. I can even insert an image, which is useful if I have a company logo. I could click the trash can icon if I ever decide I don't want this anymore. If I ever want a second signature file, I can click create new and have an entirely different one, maybe if I want to go back and forth between a work or a personal one. The important step is directly below that. Once it's done, I need to decide how I'm going to use it. For new emails, I need to choose which signature file I'm going to use, and I also need to decide if I want to use that signature file if I reply or forward an email. Now that was important, but this is the really important step. Don't forget to come all the way down to the bottom and click save changes. From here, if I click compose, I will see my new awesome signature file. Now that we've created a signature file, let's create an automatic vacation responder. This will automatically send out an email whenever anybody emails us if we're on vacation. This is also good if you have an unmonitored email inbox and you want to let everybody know. Click the gear icon, choose see all settings, scroll down again. This is the same screen that we were just at. This time, all the way down at the bottom, we are going to click to turn our vacation responder on. We need to choose the first day it's going to occur. I'll choose January 12th and the last day. Now this is optional. If you don't choose a last day, it's going to continuously send out this response. Now this is why it's great for an unmonitored inbox. This is going to let everybody know, hey, this email is not being monitored. In this case, however, I am using this as an actual vacation responder. I'm gone for a week and I come back on the 19th. I'll put in my subject and I'll type in my message. You can choose to only send a response to people that are in your contacts. It's completely up to you. As usual, you need to click save changes. This vacation responder will only start auto responding to people within that date range that you specify. You don't have to leave this Gmail window open. You can completely shut down your computer. This is all going to happen behind the scenes. If you decide you don't need this anymore or your dates have changed, you can click the gear icon again, choose see all settings and come down here and modify this. It's also going to automatically turn itself off on that last day, but if you need to turn it off before, you can always come in here and choose vacation responder off. Click save changes and now it will not automatically turn on during those dates. To reply to an email, you can use any of these smart replies or click reply. Using these smart replies won't automatically send an email. You can still include more text from here. I can either choose to send the reply, send the reply later, or use this blue button to send an archive the email at the same time. I'll be going over this, but archiving it will remove it from your inbox, but keep it in all mail so you can always search for it later. Things can get tricky in Gmail when you're working with a long email thread between multiple people. Let's take a look at this conversation. The number six means there are six emails in this thread. Down at the bottom is the last email in the thread. I can see when it came in and who it was sent to. I can do the same actions as before, except if I choose reply, it's only going to send it to the sender of this particular last email in the thread, in this case, Robert Young. If I wanted to send to everyone, I'll choose reply all. Also note that the attachment that's here will be removed in the reply. If I want to keep the attachment in place and send this email to someone else, I can instead click forward and address it to a new person. Forwarding is also a great way to resend an email to someone. Just put in their email address again. This number tells me that there are three collapsed emails in this thread. I can click on the number and then click inside any of these emails to read them. Each individual email has its own action center here on the right-hand side. I can star this particular email, which I'll also tell you about later. I can reply just to this sender. In this case, it's Anna. If I click the three dots, I can do more things like delete just this message or reply to everybody to just this message. When you reply or forward a message, you can change the subject line. You might want to do this so it doesn't look like a forward or to split this message into a new thread as Gmail uses the subject line to keep all the messages together. Click the arrows and then choose edit subject. Now you can type in a new subject line for your email. I'll close out of this. One final thing you might want to do is market unread just from this message, which is useful if I want to come back and read them all later. I could also mark any email or thread by right-clicking and choosing mark as unread. If you don't want to use this sidebar on the right-hand side, you can still create events and tasks to your emails. I'm going to select this email in the view. With it selected, a new context menu appears. I'll click the three dots and from here I can choose add to tasks. The subject line comes in, but I can change this if I want to and I can add a deadline. I'll close out of this. This time I'm going to click inside the email to open it because now when I click the three dots, I have one more option that I didn't have in that message list. I can create an event from this email. It's going to open up in Google Calendar. I can still change the subject line if I want to. I can change the time. I'm going to X out of this because this is not a virtual meeting, though it certainly could be, and instead I could add a physical location that we're going to meet at if I wanted to. In the guests section, it's automatically going to include the people that were involved in that email, in this case, the sender. When I click save, I'm given the option to send this calendar entry to them or not. There's no right or wrong. If I click send, it's going to invite them to also add it onto their calendar. If I want this entry just for me, I can click don't send. It's on my calendar, and now all I have to do is close out of that browser tab. This event isn't going to happen until next week, so I'm going to hide it and have it reappear back in my inbox when I want it to. It's called the snooze feature, and it's fantastic for things you plan in advance like concert tickets, trips, or events. Why risk losing or deleting the email when you can have it out of sight and then bounce back when it's needed? I'm going to hover my mouse all the way on the right-hand side and click snooze. I can choose a time or date that I want to snooze it to, and in this case, I'll choose next week. But for things like events or travel plans, you can choose a specific date and time to have it reappear. It disappears, and if you need it ahead of time, it's safe and sound here in the snooze section on the left-hand side. I can view it and wait for it to reappear, or I can drag it back to my inbox if I need to. I also want you to be aware that you can also see any scheduled mail you have set in this schedule section on the left-hand side as well. When you're all done, you can go back to your inbox knowing that that email is going to bounce back in when it's ready. Let's take a closer look at some of these things that you can do when you hover your mouse over an email. We know we can snooze it, but you can also mark a message as read or unread. You can delete it, and you can archive it. But look at this button to the left of this. These buttons can change based on the content of the email, and you might not see it at all for certain emails. This one happens to be a newsletter that you can unsubscribe to. So Gmail is making it possible to one-click unsubscribe from it. This email is a package, and that package has been shipped. So I can click track package from here, and it's going to open up in whatever parcel company was used. For Google security alerts, you might see a review activity button. And this is a travel plan. So here I have the option to modify that booking. Now you may not want this to happen, and you may not want these buttons visible either. You have full control over that. Click the gear icon and go into see all settings. I always recommend everybody goes through these just to see the types of things that you can change to make Gmail really work for you. But in this case, if you don't want those buttons to appear, you can choose disable hover actions. If you don't want those context buttons to appear, you can uncheck enable dynamic email. Just be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom, and as usual, click save changes. You can archive a message when you want to keep it for searching, but not see it in your inbox or any other tab. You delete a message when you're really sure you aren't going to need it again. Start by selecting your message or multiple messages to archive a message. Click the archive button. To delete it, click the delete button or the trash can icon. At the bottom of the screen, you have a few moments to change your mind and undo it if you've clicked it by mistake. You can also click more, go into trash, find your deleted messages, you can select multiple ones if there's multiple that you want to restore, and drag them back into the inbox. Your archived message has gone to a special label called all mail. I'll click more and all mail. All mail contains everything, all your mail, drafts, mail in tabs, labeled mail, everything. In fact, you can see where it is. This one's in the inbox, this one is in my sent folder because I can see that it's been sent from me. You can search for these messages anytime. Also remember, when you're replying to an email, you can also send the reply and archive the original email at the same time. That's what this icon is. If you want to remove it from your inbox, but still keep it around for searching, this is a great method to skip a step in having to click that archive button. A label is a visual tag for emails. You can label an email and keep it in the inbox like I've done here, or you can archive it with the label and then view all the emails in that label by searching or clicking on the label here. A single email can have multiple labels as you can see here. And also, these tabs are just labels. Email even labels your online shopping emails as purchases. That's how it knows to go in that list. And deleted emails, they're simply assigned to the trash label. I'm going to make a new label by clicking the plus sign next to labels. I'll give it a name. I don't have to, but I can nest it under an existing label that I have. And I'll click create. If I click on the three dots next to the name, and you can even change the label color. I'm going to click on add custom color, and you can do that if these don't work for you. Personally, I like to get the color as close to a logo that has to do with what that label is for as possible. For example, my daughter's college emails have a label, so I've assigned them to the school's colors. I'll click apply, and it's created. I can select one email, click the three dots, choose label as, and then note that you can also create a label and assign it at the same time. But for now, I'll place a check mark next to the label that I want and click apply. You can also apply a label to two emails at the same time this way. You can click on a label here on the left to see only emails associated with that label. Notice the top search bar. You can type in any label to see all of the emails associated with it. And yes, this works for trash, purchases, updates, et cetera, because remember, those are just labels. The email does not have to be in the inbox. You can archive a message that has a label and still click on that label. You may want to apply a label and remove it from your inbox at the same time. Email lets us move an email into a label. I'll select the email and click move to. I'll choose my label and off it goes. It's different from a folder. If this were a traditional mail folder, a single email would only live in that one single folder. But here, the email exists in the label. It also exists in all mail and perhaps other labels like purchases. In fact, I can click and drag and move it back to the inbox and now it's labeled as being in the inbox also. It's still visible in both the label and the inbox. There is no right or wrong method here. It's whatever works for you. You have a few methods for dealing with unwanted mail. The first one is to use the manage subscriptions feature on the left hand side after clicking more. I like this feature because it shows you the vendors that send you the most email the most frequently at the top. So you don't have to waste your time unsubscribing to all of them, just the worst offenders. You can click unsubscribe next to the ones that you don't want anymore. Another way is to bulk delete them from the promotions tab. If I scroll down, it may look like I don't have a lot of junk mail here, but Gmail limits the amount of messages you can see on this one screen. The top of the screen here will show me how many emails there are total in the promotions tab. It's currently only showing me 50 out of over 1500 total. You can view more by clicking through these arrows. And by the way, it's the same behavior on every tab. So if you're looking for a message and you don't see it, you might need to scroll. You can change this 50 to 100 messages in settings. While you can select individual messages by clicking the box next to the ones that you want, I can click this box here at the top of the screen to select everything. Or I can choose another filtered group by using the down arrow. You can delete all your emails from promotions by selecting all messages and clicking the trash can icon to delete them. But here, and this is really important, it's only selecting what's visible on the page. It's giving me the option here to click here to select all of my promotions. That is everything that you could go through if you click this arrow. Now they are all selected. So here you could do other actions like mass assign them a label or move them or archive them. Of course, you're probably going to want to delete them, but this behavior will work for any tab. I'll click to clear this. So you could start with a clean inbox or updates by selecting everything and archiving everything. Another method to visually categorize messages is by using stars, an icon based category versus a text label. This means it's up to you to create the key. That is what each star means for you for that email. By default, you can just click on a star to activate it and click on it again to turn it off. You could leave it just like that to remind you of something or go to star to view it. You can even unstar it right from here. Now here is where it gets really fun. Let's go to settings. If I scroll down, here are all the stars that I can choose to put into play. I can pick from a Gmail preset or drag in and out any star that I want to use. These are the four that I use the most. Always scroll to save. And now I can click through and see all the stars. This one's a question. I need to get around to answering it. This one looks important. And this one may be a to do. So I can go through and star everything. I can still turn them off from here, but let's go to starred. I'm all done with this, so I will unstar it. Stars work just like a label. So here's what I can type in to see all my starred emails. But you can even further refine it. Let's go back into settings. If I hover my mouse over each one, I can see the name of it, red dash bang for this one. So I can type a search operator in there called has red bang. It's going to take me right to it. There's one more neat feature of stars. Even if I star a message and it's in a different tab, it will also show up in primary. So I'll be sure to see it. You can automate some tasks in Gmail by using filters or a rule to act on incoming messages. The easiest way to get started is to select a message, click the three dots and choose filter messages like these. You can filter on any of this criteria and you can even stack them. I want messages that come from Robert that also have the word driftline. Click create filter. And now you can choose what's going to happen to it. You can simulate moving a message to a label by applying a label and then also skipping the inbox to archive it. You can even send out a template automatically, which is a great way to auto send a response. If someone includes keywords in a message indicating that they're looking for tickets, I can send out my, this event is sold out message. What I really like is that you can also process it on messages that you've received that match the criteria. This is great for batch labeling messages that are already in your inbox. So I'll apply the dance label. I'll apply it to apparently three emails that are already in my inbox. I'll click create filter. And now whenever a new message comes in, it will already have that label for me. To get started using search in Gmail, you can type what you're looking for into the search bar and hit the enter key. Start over by clicking the X to clear the search. You can also click the filter button on the right hand side to get into advanced search in which you can specify one or more of these criteria. You can even search for emails that have attachments. A good reason to do your search this way is not only can you get very specific, but you can also then click create filter to do some sort of action on all the search results. You can also go into all mail. These filter buttons at the top are very useful. You can click exclude promotions to eliminate junk mail from the view. And if you're running out of room in your Gmail account, you can quickly see large attachments by clicking has attachment. This is also useful if you're looking for something that you know somebody has sent you. In fact, you can filter the type of attachment image or document. You can also use these filter buttons with a query. They do appear here when you've put something into the search bar. This is showing me the most relevant search results. So if you look at the dates, you'll find that they will be all out of order. It's also useful to change this to most recent. This way, your search results are not only going to be in order, but remember how I told you that trash is just a label. And as it only keeps mail in there for 30 days, and you're now searching by recent mail, it will also search your mail and spam labels as spam works the same way. It's telling me here that there are some messages and trash that match my search. I can click view messages, and it's going to take me to them. I can see that they're in the trash, but I may have accidentally deleted something, and this is a great way to find them. There's one more way that you might want to find emails. You can right click on an email and select find all emails from the sender that you've clicked on. It's going to open up a special view that only contains messages from that person. Here's one last bonus tip for you. In my email, I get an email every morning at 5 a.m. telling me what my daily schedule is, and it takes that right from my Google calendar. You can have this too. If you're the type of person that likes to read your email and check your calendar every morning over coffee, now you can skip the calendar part and just check your email. If you want to do this, click the grid icon on the top right hand side of Gmail and access your calendar. Your Google calendar has a gear icon on the top right hand side, just like Gmail did, so we'll get into settings. On the left hand side, find your calendar and click the settings for that calendar. Scroll down about halfway down the page and you'll see a section that says daily agenda. It defaults to none, but change this to email. There's no save button. All you have to do is close out of the browser tab. Now you'll get this email as well every morning. You will get emails when you have no events, just like this one, but what you can do if you don't want to get this email is create a filter based on the subject line and throw it in the trash. Don't miss out on more Gmail and Google tutorials and tips, including how to turn Gmail into an AI command center. Thanks for watching. I'm Jess Stratton, and don't forget to subscribe to our channel and newsletter so you don't miss out.