Hi, this is Michael Callahan “Doctor File Finder”, now in this segment, we’re going to look at improving the interface of Gmail. Now here I have Gmail open as it normally looks kind of blue and white, kind of plain and ordinary. Here is the links to things and iff you're using Gmail all the time like I do, you might want to have a different look. So here, I have the same Gmail account that’s utilizing a plug-in called Gmail Redesigned. Now with Gmail Redesigned, you get icons for all of these boxes, you have the nice grey tone which makes it easier on your eyes, it’s not so bright. You have the contrasting colors. You can see you have things for chat, labels and so on.
So, it’s possible with other programs or plugins like Stylish that you can use Stylish sheets to change and alter the look of Gmail so that it’s more appealing to you and more useful as well. So, this is Gmail Redesigned in Gmail and that concludes part one.
Now on this segment, I'm going to talk about labels. Now labels are a feature of Gmail that a lot of people don’t use to their fullest. You can see here just glancing down that I have labels for so many things, for orders of things that I do online, for personal, SAAF, my marketing business. You can look down here, I have things that have to do with computers, banking, Butterscotch, industry contexts, invoices, payments, my personal email and lots more.
So labels are a great way to separate your mail into manageable segments so that you can look at email and see, I can see that these all pertain to my marketing business, this pertains to Twocals and it pertains to Mac because I know the color of the label but we’ll get into colors in another segment. So, if you use labels, you can click on any email and assign it a label or you can click and this one, for example has only the word test in it. So we’ll say label, create a new label, better call it test and later we’ll device a filter—we’ll call it testing. Later we’ll device a filter to automatically assign this label to emails with that word in it. So, labels are a great way to take advantage of the power of Gmail and that concludes part two.
On this segment we’re going to look at filters. And the last time we talked about labels and using more and better labels. But when you combine labels with better filters, you get a much more powerful system out of Gmail. So, just taking from my own personal email, I have checked this incoming PayPal electronic funds transfer and I click more actions and I'm going to select filter messages like these. So now a dialog is going to come up, it’s going to have the email address from PayPal, I'm going to put in the subject, PayPal electronic funds transfer and when doing things like this, you want to make sure you have it as close to the original as possible, so if they use lower case, you use lower case. Now we can do a test search, we’re finding quite a few of those, now we’ll say next step, I'm going to say apply a label. Now for this particular instance, I'm going to say a new label and I'm going to call it PayPal payments then I’ll say okay. So now when a PayPal electronic transfer comes in, it will get flagged with this label. I'm going to filter the 67 conversations it found then create the filter and all of those will come in and I’ll be able to see them when they come in because they’ll have the label attached.
So now you can see, here it is, PayPal payments, it’s labeled, it’s been filtered and if I scroll down here in the PayPal payments, there are all of my PayPal payments that have been recorded. So, this is a great way to combine filters and labels to make Gmail more powerful. On the next segment, we’re going to talk about combining colors.
On this segment I'm going to talk about colors. In the previous two segments I talked about better labels and better filters and as you could see on my screen, I'm using colors to visually organize my mail as it comes in. So, the ones that are in blue are my marketing account, SAF is in red, personal emails pertaining to my family come in and get flagged as green. My Butterscotch.com email comes in as orange. Now this one had the word action in it and so it also was assigned an action item. Now if you look down here, I have colors assigned to different categories and the way I've broken it up is that I used blue for my work email, I use orange for Butterscotch, I use yellow for things pertaining to apple. I use green for personal things, I use red for the—Industry Awards Foundation and I use variations of those colors so woodcarving pertains to me so it’s blue, work reading is blue but it’s a different shade of blue than the ones for my marketing account. Some things like sent messages and so on, I don’t assign a color to. Now, I have colors here that you won't find in the default Gmail colors because I'm using a function in Gmail Labs that allows me to have custom colors but we’re going to get to that in another segment.
So as you can see, if you use labels and filters and combine that with colors, you can get your email sorted very well. On this segment, I want to talk a little bit about my concept that when you take good labels and combine them with colors in Gmail, you’ve essentially created a folder, because I can look here instantly and see that this is from Butterscotch, that this is a personal email, that this is from SAF, that this is from Twocals. Now this one for example just came in from my sister-in-law and it’s blue because she wrote to my primary email address. But I could take and say filter messages like these—it has her email address in it, I’ll do a test search. Now the next step, I'm going to say choose a label, I'm going to create a new label called family, filter the conversations that have come in previously, create the filter and now go back to my inbox and here I can see at a glance now that this is not only just an email to my marketing account, it’s also from family. So in a sense, Gmail gives you the power to create more than folders. There are folders that can be flexible because while this is a marketing email, this is one that’s to my marketing account but that it’s from my family. I could have Butterscotch ones that are from certain people, have them labeled like they have things from the SAF or that one they're from a board member, it has its own label and in a different color. So by utilizing colors, you can effectively have a folder system that’s better than a folder system. So, experiment with this, I think you will find that it really makes your Gmail powerful and it lets you see at a glance exactly what an email pertains to and helps you organize whose emails you're going to read first.
Now on this segment I want to talk about Google Labs, Labs is juts a function that Google has in a number of its offerings where they can present features and then get user input about which ones they should implement. So in Gmail, click on settings and down here by the end you’ll see the Labs tab, click on that, well there's quite a few things in here,you can get custom date formats, you can put your labels on the right side, you can hide the unread counts, you can have advanced iMap controls. One here that I use and I recommend is the custom label colors. With custom label colors enabled, you can create a variety of colors both backgrounds and foregrounds so that you can get that unique look so that you have labels, colors and filters to give you that folder type function. You use multiple inboxes, so this is Google Labs. They added new things to it. So we’ll go back to the mailbox just to show you how the custom colors works, I will pick one here daily notes. I can go around here and say add custom colors and as you can see, it will let me change a background and then add a different text color. So essentially when I apply that, I'm going to get a blue that’s going to have light blue cyan letters on it, when it comes in to my email box.
So, Google Labs is a great way to try out different things, perhaps alter the way Gmail works for you as far as where things are placed on the screen and so on and that concludes part six.
Now in this segment, I'm going to talk about getting Google documents into your Gmail because as you progress in your use of Gmail, you're probably going to want to have quick access to your Google documents. So, this is another function of Labs, we’ll click on settings, go to Labs, now we scroll down here. There’s one handy one here that I kind of like that also pertains to documents. This one here is create a document where you can create a Google document from an email conversation or a new blank document from your keyboard if you have shortcuts and hit GW, so this is kind of handy because I've used this to take an email and put it into a Google document, but to have Google documents quickly accessible from your Gmail interface, go right down here, Google docs gadget, it adds a box in the left column, this displays your Google docs so here’s recent docs, shared docs and has fast search. Click enable on that, make sure you click save changes and when that’s done, we’ll go back to our inbox, scroll down and you can see here I have Google documents right here that I can quickly access with the click of a button, right from my Gmail.
So this is an extremely handy function, I can check my Google documents, I can toggle that other feature to create a document right from an email and then I can quickly access that document from this Labs function. So this is how you can get Google Documents in your Gmail and that concludes part seven.
On this segment I'm going to talk about Google Gears. And Gears is a cool, open source project that allows your web applications to interact with the web more naturally and to have some of your content offline. So, I'm going to go to the Gears page, I have the link to this in the show notes, it will say install Gears. First we have to agree to the license agreement, say agree and download. We’re going to save the file. Now, when the file is done downloading, we just double-click on it to install it and run this file, now Gears is going to install. Okay that’s going in, it’s initializing. Now, we’re asked to restart our web browser. Okay so now you see here, Gears is installed, go back to my Gmail and you’ll see up here I have offline, click on that, offline mail from my accounts, access most of my mail offline, it will download my email messages onto this computer so I say next, I trust this site, allow it to use Google Gears, have it put one on my desktop, say OK and then that concludes. So then you have access to your Gmail even when you're offline and periodically it will update to download your latest messages so you have them on your computer.
Now on this segment I'm going to talk about getting Remember The Milk into your Gmail. For those of you who don’t know, Remember The Milk is a powerful task tool that’s online so you can access it from everywhere just like Gmail. So far we’ve gotten to the point where we have out Gmail labeled, filtered, colored, we have our Google Documents, we use Gears to get our mail offline and now we’re going to get our tasks in there. So, we’ll go to the Remember The Milk site, I’ll have links for these things in the show notes, click on Services. I'm going to be doing an entire series on Remember The Milk, so watch for that’s because there’s Remember The Milk for the iPhone, for the Blackberry but here is Remember The Milk for Gmail. So we’ll click on that, it’s a regular Firefox extension, there’s also a Milk Gadget for Labs but we’re going to do the Gmail Firefox extension, say Install Now, it’s asking me if that’s okay, I’ll say Allow That,now it pops up, it comes down, Install Now. I'm going to want to restart Firefox,I'm going to say OK. Okay so Firefox is restarted, we’ll go back to our inbox. Here is Remember The Milk, I’ll have to sign to my account and now you can see that Remember The Milk will appear right here down the site or I can manage tasks, do things that I need to get done, I remember to put out the trash today so I can mark that as complete.
So, this is a handy way to manage your tasks right in Gmail, it’s right here, you can't miss it, you can postpone things, move things, share tasks, do everything that Remember The Milk can do right from your Gmail interface.
Now on this final segment of this intermediate tutorial series, I want to talk to you about archiving mail in Gmail. Now when you archive mail, it goes in to the All Mail label. Now, over the years, I have used virtually every email program that exists and one of the problems with backing up or archiving your email is that you always lost your attachments. That is not the case with Gmail. So for example, my daughter Malena sends me pictures of my grandchildren, so I can search on Malena and pictures and I can find all these emails that have pictures attached. So, I not only have the email, I have the pictures. So she can ask me, do you remember that picture I sent you six months ago and I still have it because I have archived it in Gmail. Now, Google says like, why delete anything because you have all the space? So I personally don’t believe in keeping a bunch of junk around so I delete junk and emails that are of no use to me but to me, if you have an email that is useful, you should archive it. You can archive it by clicking, checking it and saying Archive or from in the email, you can simply press the E key and it goes to the All Mail section. So, one of the more powerful features of Gmail is the ability to archive and keep mail that goes back weeks, months, years so that you can search and find the things you want, you can search and find attachments you need.
So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this intermediate series on Gmail and that concludes part 10.
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