Before you try anything else, check the Gmail home page (http://gmail.google.com). As of this writing, the service was still invitation-only, but by the time you’re reading, Google might have made it free for all.

If you find yourself stuck behind the virtual velvet rope of Club Gmail, fear not. Gmail invitations are easy to come by these days. First, ask anyone you know, or anyone who has sent you email from a Gmail account, if she can spare an invite. With a steady 100 invitations at their disposal, most Gmailers have extras to dispense.

If you don’t personally know a Gmailer who’ll invite you onboard, fire up Google itself and search for Gmail invitations, which should generate results with plenty of sites that dispense spare Gmail accounts, like the Gmail Invite Spooler (http://isnoop.net/gmail).

No matter where your Gmail invitation comes from, you’ll need an existing email address to receive the invite. Once you’ve persuaded someone to send the Gmail invite to you, you’ll get a message like the one in Figure 11-2.

When you use the Web link from the Gmail invite, you land on an account setup page that looks pretty much like any other. The page has a form where you type in the email address, name, language, and password you’d like to use for your Gmail account. Click the “check availability!” button (as shown in Figure 11-3) to see if your desired account name is available.

If it’s not, you’ll have to type in something else until you come up with a unique Gmail address. Be sure to pick an address you like, because you can’t change it without getting another invite and making yourself a whole new account. Luckily, the one thing you don’t have to type in on the account-creation page is a credit card number.

Figure 11-2. Your ticket into Gmail comes in the form of a Gmail invitation message sent by a friend or other keeper of Gmail Invites. Just click the supplied Web link or paste it into your browser to get to the Gmail account-creation page.

As soon as you’ve created your new Gmail account, Google whisks you away to a Welcome screen highlighting all the latest and greatest features of the service. If you want to get right to the part where you actually get to send email to people, look for a link that says “I’m ready—show me my account.” Click that link and you’re off to your brand new Gmail Inbox.

Figure 11-3. The Gmail account-creation page is a simple form where you type in the name you’d like to appear on your Gmail messages, as well as the email address you’d like to use (the Desired Login Name becomes your address). Once Google has approved your choice of address, proceed down the form to choose a password and a secret security question Gmail will ask you if you forget your password.

When you first open Gmail, you may notice that it looks slightly different from other Web-based email services, as you can see in Figure 11-4. For one thing, there’s a Search box right on top of the window that lets you type in keywords and track down a particular message in your vast, two-and-a-half-gigabyte mailbox.

After that, the top of the Gmail window has a series of buttons and links for various features and aspects of the service, including the Settings for your account (Section 11.5.2), a Help area, a place to create a mail filter (Section 11.3.4), and buttons to archive mail (Section 11.3) and report spam (Section 11.2.8).

The controls for creating new messages, as well as those for the other sections of your Gmailbox (like your Inbox, Sent Mail, Spam, and Trash areas), appear along the left side of the window. Just click the link to bop to another part of your mailbox. For example, if you want to see messages you’ve sent, click the Sent Mail link, and you’ll find yourself wading around in copies of messages you’ve already fired off to people. To get back to your Inbox, just click the Inbox link.

Figure 11-4. The typical Gmail Inbox has everything laid out neatly for you. Links to your collection of mailboxes, contacts, message labels, and Gmail invites are along the left side of the window. Past and present messages are front and center. Multiple sender names mean you’re having a conversation with more than one person, and the number in parentheses corresponds to the number of messages in the conversation. Messages can be tagged with labels (like “Books”) or starred for importance, and the bold subject lines mean the note is unread.

The left side of the main window also contains a link to your Gmail contacts—the address book for all your correspondents, described in detail in Section 11.3.7—as well as the controls for making labels for your messages (Section 11.3.3), a simple system that lets you group them under headings.

If you have messages in your Inbox (and there should be at least one: the welcome note from Google), Gmail shows you 50 of them at a time, with the most recently received at the top. To see older messages, click the links in the upper-right or bottom-right corner of the window to jump to the previous 50 messages or the very oldest 50. Unlike most conventional mail programs, you can’t sort your Inbox by sender or oldest-message-first, but Gmail does let you search for messages with specific criteria (Section 11.3.5), which gives you a similar way of viewing things.

From your Inbox, you can click any message to open not only that individual message, but also any messages you sent or received that are part of that particular exchange. When an email program clumps together all the messages in one discussion, it’s often called threading, though Gmail calls these clumps conversations (Section 11.2.7). Once you get used to them, conversations are a great way to keep on top of your email because you don’t have to hop all over your Inbox to remember who said what to whom and when.

When you’ve opened a message (Figure 11-5), the edges of the Gmail window look pretty much the same as in the Inbox view, but the right side of the window now contains the controls for printing your messages and expanding or collapsing conversations (Section 11.2.7). The aforementioned ad links also show up on this side of the window. (The ad links are very subdued, with no flash-dancing windows or colored boxes popping up at you as you try to read your mail.) As advertising goes, it’s almost tasteful, and if you’re deep in electronic conversation, you might forget that the ad links are even there.

Now that you’ve had a little time to get used to the look of Gmail, it’s time to start sending out mail like a power user. The next section tells you how.

Figure 11-5. An open Gmail message with an exchange between two people. The left side of the mailbox window has all your controls for creating a message or moving and organizing existing ones. The Sponsored Links on the right side (not shown here) pick up keywords in the message, particularly “Chicago” and “pizza”—two great tastes that go great together. Even Google’s adbot recognizes the fact.

As you may have noticed, not everybody on Earth uses the same word-processing software or email program. Choice is good, but when you and a correspondent use different software, formatting in the same document or email message can vary wildly or looked completely scrambled on one of your machines. Plain text is pretty much a universal format because it includes no formatting at all, but it’s dull.

Fortunately, the world has rich text, too. The term has nothing to do with the economic status or dairy quotient of your message; instead, it refers to a format that lets you add type styles like bold and italic to your otherwise plain text.

Rich text is the next most common format after plain text, which means lots of computers can read it readily. Even better, it gives you juicy options for text styling. You can make certain words in your message bold or italic, underline them for even more emphasis (“Honey, don’t forget to bring home MiLk tonight”), change the size of your fonts for dramatic effect, change your fonts to a prettier typeface, create bulleted lists, and much more.

To create a message with rich-text formatting, click Compose Mail and then click the “Rich formatting” link above the message window. A toolbar like the one in Figure 11-9 immediately pops up with a variety of text-enhancing options.

Figure 11-9. If you don’t know the meaning of a symbol in the toolbar, just move over it to reveal a yellow label for that icon. The icon of a T next to what looks like a Rubik’s Cube is the button for font colors. The T with “x” next to it removes formatting from your selected text.

To apply text styling to a message you’ve just whipped up, select the words you’d like to style by highlighting them with the cursor, and then click the icon for the type of style you want to use: B for bold, I for italic, and so on. You can use the text-alignment controls toward the other end of the toolbar to center your text lines on screen.

You can start a message in plain text and switch to rich formatting in the middle of typing. If you start the message in rich formatting and decide to go back to plain text for the whole thing (when you realize your recipient has an ancient email program that can’t display rich text properly), you can switch back to plain text (on the Rich Text toolbar, click the “Plain text” link). Gmail gives you a warning that you’ll lose all your rich-text formatting, but you probably knew that was going to happen.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, just think of all the typing you’d save by attaching photos and other image files to your Gmessages. You can add several kinds of file attachments to your mail, including JPEG photos, Word and Excel documents, MP3 songs, and other popular file types. Each Gmail message and attachment can be up to 10 megabytes in size, which is quite a generous amount compared to what other mail services allow you to send. You can fit about three average pop-song MP3 files or six average-size digital photos in 10 megabytes of space; Word documents can range in size from a few kilobytes to The File That Ate Cleveland, depending on what you’ve got inside, so check the file’s size before attaching it to your message.

To attach a file to your Gmail message-in-progress, look below the message’s Subject line for the “Attach a file” link next to the little paper clip icon. Click it to open up a new box on the message form with a handy Browse button right next to it, as shown in Figure 11-10.

Figure 11-10. Click the Browse button to navigate through your computer until you find the file you want to send—or, if you already know the file path, just type it in.

Click the Browse button and navigate through your hard drive until you find the file you want to attach. Once you locate the file, select it and then click Open. Gmail jumps back to the message window, where a file path (a cryptic string of names and slashes in Computerese that points to the file’s location on your system) appears next to the paper clip icon, signifying that your file is attached to the message. If you need to attach another file to the same message, click the “Attach another file” link and repeat the process.

If you change your mind about sending a file, click the “remove” link on the other side of the Browse button to knock the attachment off the message.

When you’ve got your message written and your attachments lined up, click Send.

Picasa is an intuitive and powerful photo-management program, and there are two really great things about it. First, it’s free to download at www.picasa.com. Second, Google owns it, so it works seamlessly with Gmail.

“Why,” you wonder, “do I need a whole ‘nother photo program when I just read that whole section about attaching files directly in Gmail?” The truth is, you don’t need Picasa to send picture attachments in Gmail, but it makes managing your whole digital photo collection and sharing pics via email a lot easier. (And it does some other really cool stuff, too.)

When you first install Picasa, the program scans your system and displays a thumbnail image of every single photo lurking in the deepest, darkest corners of your computer, as shown in Figure 11-11.

Figure 11-11. Google’s free Picasa program seeks out and shows you every photo scattered around your system. In addition to organizing your collection, you can also perform basic touch-up tasks like fixing red eye and adjusting the color in your pictures. For a good tutorial on all Picasa’s features, check out http://picasa.google.com/support/.

One of the things that makes Picasa worth its wait in download time is the program’s ability to instantly resize and attach photos to messages. This is a huge boon, because digital cameras usually take photos at higher resolutions than you’d want for sending and viewing them in email (that is, the pictures have a ton of information per square inch, making them really hefty). All that extra digital data becomes a burden when you attach a wad—or even just one full-size photo—to an email, creating a monster message that might choke your recipient’s email server or clog up his system if he’s on a dial-up connection. And even if the message doesn’t die in transit, the time it takes to download could make your correspondents want to kill you.

Picasa comes to the rescue by quickly downsizing a copy of each photo you want to send before attaching it to an outgoing message for you.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Picasa—and let it round up all your photos—attaching a picture to a Gmail message is easy. In Picasa, find the photo you want to send, click it once to select it (Ctrl-click to select multiple pics), and then click the Email button at the bottom of the Picasa window.

Picasa presents a box asking you to pick the email program you’d like to use to send the photos. You have your choice of your PC’s default email program (Outlook Express, Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, whatever), your Gmail account, or Picasa’a own mail program. Select your Gmail account if that’s the one you want to use. If this is your initial voyage into emailing with Picasa, you’ll be asked to type in your account name and password.

After you supply the information, Picasa pops up a message window in which you can address and type in a note to your recipient. As shown in Figure 11-12, the window also displays a small thumbnail version of the photo(s) you’re sending and lists the file size of the attachment Picasa has created. When you’re done with the message, just click the Send button to blast off your picture mail.

Figure 11-12. Digital photos can be ginormous files to send. Picasa saves the day by automatically shrinking them down so they still look good—but won’t take forever to download on the receiving end.

You can have Gmail add a signature file to the bottom of each and every message you send. A signature file is usually your full name and contact information—like an electronic business card pasted to the tail end of your message—but some people prefer to put stirring historical quotes, classic lines from The Simpsons, King of the Hill jokes, or other bits of text-based whimsy at the end of a message. It’s all up to you.

To create a signature file in your Gmail account, click the Settings link at the top of the Gmail window. In the Mail Settings area, you can change all sorts of things about how Gmail looks and feels, but for now, click the General tab and then scroll down to the Signature area, which is at the bottom of the General tab. Click the button next to the empty text box (Figure 11-13), and then type in the information you’d like to include in all your messages.

Figure 11-13. Even though any email recipient will get your e-address in your message headers, it’s not a bad idea to include your address in the signature file anyway. Putting it at the bottom of every message simply makes it easier for people to find.

When you’ve got it just the way you want it, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the window. The next time you click Compose Mail, your blank message form will pop up with your signature file attached, complete with a little separator line between where the message text ends and the signature file begins. Just type your message above it.

If you decide you don’t want to use the signature file for that particular message, simply delete it from the bottom before you click the Send button. If you tire of having a signature file altogether, return to Settings → General, and then click the button next to No Signature before clicking the Save Changes button.

Once you’ve sent off a few messages from your new Gmail account, you won’t have to wait long for people to start writing you back. And when the messages start flooding your Inbox, Gmail includes plenty of tools to help you organize and keep track of them—even those lengthy back-and-forth electronic conversations you have over the course of days or weeks.

As soon as you sign in to your Gmail account, all your new messages appear in bold at the top of your Inbox. You can tell how many new ones have arrived by looking at the number in parentheses next to the Inbox link on the left side of the screen (Figure 11-14).

If you’re in the middle of message ping-pong with someone and want to see if they’ve written you back while you’ve been writing messages to other people, head to the top of the Inbox window, and then click the Refresh link to the right of the More Actions menu; this link tells Gmail to check for and display any fresh messages.

Figure 11-14. Gmail helpfully tells you the number of new messages in your Inbox. Unread messages appear in bold, and messages that are part of back-and-forth exchanges, which Gmail calls conversations (see the next page), have a number next to the sender’s name that tells you how many messages are part of the conversation. The subject lines for messages you’ve read and conversations you’re caught up on have a light-blue background in the Inbox.

At first glance, the Gmail Inbox looks like any other emailbox: stacks of messages with the sender’s name, the message subject and the date it was sent all piled on top of each other. After you use Gmail for a few days, though, you may notice a few unique things about the service.

Conversation View

When it’s not spam, email can be a form of dialogue between you and a friend or group of friends. Google has taken this idea to heart and makes it an integral part of the Gmail system, which it calls Conversation View. People familiar with electronic mailing lists, message-board posts, Slashdot article responses, and other digital discussions call these ongoing messages on the same topic threads. Gmail calls them conversations. Once you get used to it, this feature is handy—which is a good thing, because you can’t turn it off.

With conversations, Gmail clusters together all messages with the same Subject line. The clusters appear anytime you see a message that has related messages attached to it, most commonly in your Inbox and when you open a message.

When you’re on your Inbox page, you can tell you have a conversation going because a message line has a number after it in parentheses, which you can see in Figure 11-14. This number indicates how many messages have been passed in the conversation and who was in on it for easy reference. When you click a conversation, Gmail opens it as a clump, shown in Figure 11-15.

Figure 11-15. In the open Conversation View, Gmail places earlier messages—those you’ve already read and replied to—at the top of the clump, and it places the newest messages at the bottom, ready to read.

Tip

If you have extremely chatty pals, you may notice that Gmail doesn’t show the entire text of long messages. If you find any of these truncated notes, click the “More options” link next to the sender’s name, and then click the link for Show Original to get the full story on your screen.

To see what you or a correspondent said in a prior message in the conversation, click one of the previous emails to expand the view and read it right there without having to burrow back though your Inbox looking for it. You can also click the Expand/Collapse All link on the right side of the window to open or close all the previous messages in one fell swoop. If you want to read the conversation in a new window, click the “New window” link (also on the right side of the Gmail screen).

To continue the conversation, you can hit Reply right there as you read the most recent message in the exchange and have all the previous messages right in front of you as you make plans, argue a point, or wheedle a raise. Once you’re done reviewing prior messages, click the Expand/Collapse All link to collapse them back.

Note

Most people get tons of email a day, but you can tell Gmail to let you know which messages in the Inbox were addressed just to you personally, and which ones were addressed to a group that happens to include you. The Gmail Personal Level Indicator arrows point the way: A single > arrow means the message was sent to a group, and a double arrow (>>) means the message was sent only to you.

To turn on the arrows, click the Settings link at the top of the Inbox page and click the radio button to turn on Personal Level Indicators. Messages from Internet mailing lists won’t get the arrow treatment, but the rest of your mail will soon be divided between the We and the Me.

Downloading file attachments

In Gmail, you can receive file attachments up to 10 megabytes in size. In your Inbox, you can tell a message has an attachment, because on the right end of the message line, Gmail displays a paper clip. If you open a message with a JPEG picture attachment, you see a small thumbnail of the image, along with links to view the picture at full size right there on the screen, or to download it to your hard drive (Figure 11-16). (Some picture-file types like TIFF aren’t as forthcoming as Internet-friendly JPEG files, though, so you may just see a file icon next to the View and Download links.) If you get a word processing document or other non-picture file, you just get the option to download the attachment to your hard drive. (The exception to receiving attachments is executable files, discussed in the box in Section 11.2.2.)

Figure 11-16. When you receive a photo or other file attachment along with a message, you can download it to your hard drive by clicking the Download link next to the thumbnail image. When you click Download, you get the generic Windows dialog box asking if you want to open the file or save it to your hard disk. If you choose to save the file to your disk, your browser dumps a copy of the file to your preferred spot for downloaded files.

Note

If you use Google’s Picasa photo-management software (Section 11.2.3), you can easily keep track of all the digital images people send you after you download the pictures to your hard drive, because Picasa automatically displays any new photo files it finds on your hard drive.

Once you see a photo in Picasa, you just need to click its thumbnail image once to see what its name is and what folder it lives in on your computer. Double-click the thumbnail image to call up a toolbox of photo-editing options like cropping and contrast controls.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Cleaning Out the Cache Closet

I sometimes have trouble downloading my Gmail attachments. I know we get 10 megabytes of space for each message, so what’s the deal?

Your Web browser spends every surfing session downloading the little bits and pieces that make up a Web page, including text and images. It places all of these parts in a folder called the cache, a temporary storage space that speeds up surfing because it holds elements of Web sites on your computer—which means you don’t have to download all the parts again every time you visit a site.

If you spend hours on the Web every day, however, your cache folder can start to get large and unwieldy, which can have a couple of repercussions for Gmailing. It can make using Gmail unbearably slow, and it can also prevent you from successfully downloading attachments that come in with your messages.

Fortunately, you can clear out the cache, removing the old Web site detritus and giving you room to move around and download.

Before you clear out the cache, log out of your Gmail account and close any other browser windows.

To dump the cache in Internet Explorer for Windows, choose Tools → Internet Options → General. Then, under Temporary Internet Files, click the Delete Files button, and turn on the checkbox next to “Delete all offline content” before clicking OK.

To clear the cache in the Firefox browser, choose Tools → Options → Privacy. Click Cache, and then click the Clear button before clicking OK.

Cache-chucking is even easier in Apple’s Safari browser for Mac OS X. Just choose Safari → Empty Cache, or press ⌘-Option-E.

Cheap Rolexes! Quality software at a fraction of the retail price! Enhancements for body parts you may not even have! Spam is a fact of life for anyone who has had an email account for more than 20 minutes. Fortunately, email software and service providers, including Gmail, are fighting back with filters that help block junk mail—or at least reroute it away from your Inbox and into its own festering holding pen (or the Trash).

Gmail automatically bounces as much spam as it can into your Spam box. But it needs your help in identifying incoming junk mail that slips through to your Inbox. When you see a message that’s obviously unwanted garbage mail, select it by turning on the checkbox next to the sender’s name, and then click the Report Spam button at the top of the mailbox window (Figure 11-17). That feature lets you smack the spam right out of your Inbox and into your Spam bin—while also giving the Gmail system the information it needs to block similar messages from slithering into your Inbox the next time around.

Figure 11-17. When you report spam, you help Google get smarter by building up its database of spammers, which makes it easier for Gmail to recognize—and nix—junk mail when it next sees it.

If you suspect a message you actually want landed in your Spam box, click the Spam link on the left side of the mailbox window to see which messages wound up in there. If Gmail has gotten too aggressive and tagged a legitimate message as spam, you can rectify the situation by turning on the checkbox next to its header and clicking the Not Spam button at the top of the window. Doing so moves the message back into your Inbox and puts the sender back in your Gmail good graces by adding him or her to your Contacts list to ensure express delivery into your Inbox.

Of course, if you peek in your Gmail Spam box and see that all of it’s total dreck, there’s something deeply satisfying about clicking Select: All and then whamming the mouse button down on the glorious Delete Forever button.

Let’s face it—you can store a heckuva lotta messages in two and a half gigabytes of space. That’s good because you rarely have to think about throwing out old messages to keep your mailbox from bulging into overflow. On the other hand, letting all your mail hang around can clutter up your Inbox fast.

To help keep things under control, Gmail lets you archive older messages, which means that you can keep them around for historical reference, but you don’t have to see them in your Inbox. If you archive a message or conversation, it moves from your Inbox to the mailbox called All Mail.

To archive a message, from your Inbox, turn on the checkbox next to the sender’s name, and then, at the top of the column, click Archive. You can also archive an open message or an entire conversation, as shown in Figure 11-18. (When you archive a message that’s part of a conversation, the whole conversation gets filed away in All Mail.)

Figure 11-18. When you have an open message or conversation, clicking the Archive button moves the selected message—or the entire conversation, if there is one—out of your active Inbox and into the All Mail area of your Gmail account, where you can find it if ever you need it again.

If you want to see the archived messages, click the All Mail link on the left side of the Gmail window. You can send a message back to your Inbox by selecting it in the All Mail list and then, at the top of the screen, clicking “Move to Inbox.”

Clicking the box next to the sender’s name in your Gmail Inbox selects that message for a specific action. For example, if you’re in the middle of a hot email session with a friend and you get called away before you can reply to the last note, you can “star” the message by clicking the More Actions pop-up menu and then choosing Add Star. This action applies a little yellow five-point star to the message’s entry in your Inbox (Figure 11-19), so you remember you have to go back and send a reply.

You can apply stars to a bunch of messages at once by turning on the checkbox next to each message and then choosing More Actions → Add Star from the menu at the top of the Inbox.

Figure 11-19. The star can mean whatever you want—it doesn’t have to remind you to reply. If you often get messages from celebrities, for example, you can use the star to signify who is, in fact, a star.

In general, once you turn on the checkbox next to the sender’s name in the Gmail Inbox, you’ve selected that message or messages for an action. You can archive all the selected messages, move them out of your life and into your Trash area, or even give them all the same label, a trick described in the next section.

If you want to get fancy with your selections, the Select line near the top and bottom of your Gmail Inbox gives you a lot of power. With just one click, you can select:

Instead of folders for separating your mail into categories, Gmail gives you labels. You create a label and attach it to any relevant messages, and then Gmail lets you sift out all the messages with that label.

In your Inbox, the label shows up in small green type to the left of the messages’ Subject line. But that’s not the best way to find labeled messages. Instead, you can use Gmail’s search (Section 11.3.5), or you can use the label link. Here’s how it works: Every time you create a new label, Gmail adds to the left side of the screen a link for that label. When you click the label link, Gmail automatically shows you all the messages with that label.

For example, if you want to keep all the messages from members of your book club separate from the messages from people in your duckpin bowling league, you can create a message label called Book Club to apply to all the messages from people in the group. Gmail then gives you a link for Book Club, and when you click it, you see a list of only those messages with the Book Club label. It’s similar to having a folder for your Book Club messages, but more flexible because you can leave a message in your Inbox or All Mail box and label it Book Club at the same time and label it From Sister, too. That means you don’t have to decide the best place for a message—you can tag it in all the ways that you deem relevant.

You can quickly create a label by heading to the left side of the Gmail window, and then clicking the green “Edit labels” link (if you have any existing labels, they’re already listed here). That link takes you to the Labels screen, shown in Figure 11-20, where you can not only create a new label by typing it into the “Create a new label” box and then clicking the Create button, but you can also see any existing labels, plus how many mail conversations you’ve tagged with each label.

Once you’ve created a label, Gmail adds it to the More Actions menu, which you can see back in Figure 11-19. To add the label to new messages, you have two choices:

You can rename older labels if they’ve become outdated (if your book club morphs into a Harley club, this is the feature for you), or remove a label entirely (who needs that NCAA Final Four Pool label after the tournament’s over, anyway?). On the Labels screen (Figure 11-20), just click the links on the right side of the screen to get a dialog box letting you type in a new name or confirm your deletion.

Figure 11-20. On the left side of the window, clicking Edit Labels opens this screen.

Want to see all the messages with a particular label? From the Labels screen or from the Labels list on the left side of the Gmail window, click the label name to get a list of all the messages with that tag. If you want to remove the label from a single message or from a few messages in the list, turn on the checkbox next to the ones you want to un-label, and then, at the top of window, click “Remove label <label_name>“.

Mail filters are like air-traffic control for your Gmail: They check and direct incoming messages and route them to the right place.

Say you subscribe to a mailing list of people all discussing a certain topic, like 19th century American literature or pet chinchillas, over email. Depending on how many people are on the mailing list and how chatty they are, you could be in for a lot of messages bombarding your mailbox along with all the mail from friends, family, your book club, and other correspondents.

With a mail filter, however, you can instruct Gmail to look out for all messages coming from the mailing list, and then have it automatically slap a label on them, add a star to them, or even forward a copy to another email address. They’re a great way to help you maintain control of a busy Inbox.

To create a filter for incoming messages, click the Settings link at the top of the page, and then click Filters to get to the screen shown in Figure 11-21. You can also click the “Create a filter” link at the top of the Gmail window, right next to the “Search the Web” button.

Figure 11-21. The area labeled “Create a Filter” is the part you care about at this stage.

The first step in making a filter is telling Gmail what to watch out for in an incoming message. You can specify that it look for messages from a certain correspondent or email list, or that it look for messages to a particular group, with a specific subject line, or including certain body text. You can also turn on the checkbox that flags messages with attachments. Just type in the criteria you want, filling in one or more of the fields.

Once you’ve told Gmail how to recognize a certain type of message, you need to click the Next Step button and tell it what to do with the message.

As shown in Figure 11-22, you have several actions to choose from. You can have Gmail automatically star the message, archive it, label it, forward it to a different address, or dump it directly in the Trash (a popular option for the still-bitter and unexpectedly single). Once you’ve decided on all the actions you want to take with messages that match your criteria, click the Create Filter button to set the whole thing up. From here on out, Gmail performs these actions without any further work on your part.

Figure 11-22. If you click the “Show current filters” link, Gmail abandons the creation process and opens a list of existing filters.

If Google is known for anything, it’s for being a top-notch search engine. And it can search your Gmail just as deftly and accurately as it can dig up results on the Web for “cute pictures of baby ducks”. You can use many of the same search techniques and operators (Section 2.6) you use for regular Google Web searches on your own Gmail, too.

If you’re just doing a quick search for words or phrases you know are in a message or subject line but can’t remember anything else about it, just type the keywords into the blank box at the top of the Gmail window and then click the Search Mail button. Gmail will scour the contents of your mail account and give you a list of any messages containing those keywords. The list contains up to 20 messages per page, sorted by most recently received first; to see older messages, click the Older link in the upper- or lower-right corners of the window.

Gmail won’t automatically check your Spam and Trash bins for matching messages. If your results don’t include the message you’re looking for, click the “Show search options” link at the top of the Gmail page, and then on the next screen, choose Search → All & Spam & Trash, as illustrated in Figure 11-23, to search all your mailboxes.

Alternatively, if your list of results is too big to be useful, adding criteria is a good way to narrow it down. Click “Show search options” to get the screen in Figure 11-23, where you can home in on a message. In fact, you can use this form to start a search, a handy trick when you want guidance in defining a lot of criteria for your hunt. Just click “Show search options” from any screen.

Figure 11-23. Gmail doesn’t have an Advanced Search form per se. But in this Search Options box, you can add parameters to your search, like whom the message is from, the relative time it arrived, or if it included a file attachment.

To close the Search Options box, in the upper-right corner of the box, click “Hide search options.”

Power searching

Just as you can get Google to rustle up definitions for you by typing define: before a word in the search box (Section 1.6.1), Gmail can respond to a series of simple commands (called operators by database divas) designed for finding messages that contain certain elements, like a specific sender. For instance, if you want to find all the mail your pal Kermit has sent you, type from:kermit in the Search Mail box to have Gmail show you a list of messages just from him. Likewise, you can search for message you’ve sent to Kermit by typing to:kermit in the box. While you can similarly limit searches by using the Search Options box described previously, operators save you some clicking around and give you more choices. (Figure 11-24 shows you how it works.)

Figure 11-24. Here, a search for label:music rounded up all the messages labeled “music.”

Here are additional operators you can use with Gmail (in each case, you’d swap in your own keyword or phrase instead of the word “something”):

• subject:something. Searches for words in a message’s Subject line. For example, if you search for subject:online, Gmail gives you any message that includes the word online in the subject—even if the subjects have other words, too.

• label:something. Searches for messages tagged with one of your custom labels.

• has:attachment. Searches for messages with attachments.

• filename:something. Searches for attachments by their file names.

• cc:something. Searches for messages by names in the Cc: field.

• bcc:something. Searches for messages by names in the Bcc: field.

For real power, you can combine operators. If you want to search for messages from either Kermit or Teddy, string it together as from:kermit OR from:teddy. If you have a ton of messages from Kermit but want to find the one where he sent you a photo of his pet chinchilla, type from:kermit has:attachment to narrow things down.

Punctuation marks can get pressed into duty as search operators as well. Think of the hyphen (-) as a minus sign and put it in front of any words you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example, searching for games -doom looks for messages where you discussed games, but not Doom.

Typing words between parentheses lets you search for messages that contain all of those words. If you want to find all the messages where you discussed both baseball and football with Kermit, type from:kermit (baseball football) to dig up results.

To find messages containing an exact phrase, put the words between quotation marks in your Search box, as in “live long and prosper” or subject:"Star Trek”.

You can also track down messages with a handful of self-explanatory time-and-place operators by typing in a location or time after the colon:

	in:inbox
	in:spam
	in:trash
	in:anywhere
	after:2005/05/17
	before:2005/07/13

Note

The before and after keywords search for when a message was sent, not when it was received. Email is so fast these days, though, that it’s not likely to make a difference.

Tacking in more information, like if the message was starred or unread, can help produce precise search results as well:

	is:starred
	is:unread
	is:read

When you get a bunch of these operators working all at once, you have searches that look like your keyboard’s colon key is out of control, like from:kermit is:starred subject:(death OR taxes) before:2005/04/14.

When you’re done with a message and never want to think about it again, you can dump it out of your Inbox in two ways:

While either of these actions moves the unwanted email into the Trash box, it doesn’t permanently erase it immediately. Instead, Gmail waits for 30 days before automatically clearing out the Trash box. (Until then, you can still see the old messages by clicking the Trash link in the Gmail window.) To permanently dispose of all the old mail right away, click the Trash link and select all the messages by clicking the Select: All link at the top of the column. Click the Delete Forever button (Figure 11-25) to permanently zap the selected messages.

Figure 11-25. If you’ve inadvertently trashed a message, you can use this screen to restore it to your Inbox; just click the “Move to Inbox” button. However, if you just can’t wait to erase a message forever—like a particularly racy message from your extramarital lover—click the Delete Forever button so your spouse never stumbles upon it.

When you want to convert a digital note into a paper copy, Gmail is on your side. This feature is useful when, say, you buy movie tickets online and want to print out your bar-coded proof of purchase so you can skip the line at the ticket printer in the theater’s crowded lobby. To print a solo message, just open it and click the Print icon on the right side of the window.

Printing can get confusing, however, when you have a 20-message conversation onscreen but just want to print out the one message in the bunch. To print out a single message buried in a Gmail conversation, open the conversation, click the Expand All link on the right, and then find the message you want to print. Since each message in the conversation has its own “More options” link, click just the “More options” link in the desired message, and then, from the list of choices below the Subject line, click Print.

You can add individual email addresses to Gmail when you’re in the Contacts window (from the main window, just click the Contacts link). On the Contacts page, click the Add Contact link, and then fill in the form.

The basic screen allows for just a name, primary email address, and some random notes. If you’re a completist and want detailed information on your pals, click the “add more contact info” link to add names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and more to the Contact file, as shown in Figure 11-27. When you’re done, click Save to confirm and store all the new information you just added.

Figure 11-27. When you opt to add more contact info, Gmail gives you some flexibility. For additional choices—like IM, Mobile, Fax, Company, and so forth—click the arrow next to Phone or Email to get a menu of choices. To add additional fields with this menu, click “add another field.” If you want to nix a whole section, click “remove section”; to add a whole section (handy if you’re storing work and home addresses, for instance), click “add section.”

Manually adding address information into your Gmail Contacts is all well and good, but what if you have a nice full address book you’ve been working with for years—and it happens to be in another email program like Eudora or Outlook Express?

If your other mail program lets you export your address list to what’s called a CSV file, you can import it right into your Gmail Contacts. (CSV is spreadsheet-nerd shorthand for Comma Separated Values, which means that each nugget of information is separated from every other info-nugget by a mighty comma.)

Converting contacts for use with Gmail varies depending on what email program you’re using. With some, it’s a simple export operation, while other mail programs make you jump through a few hoops. You may even have to muscle the file around in Microsoft Excel, Corel’s Quattro Pro, or another spreadsheet program to get it to play nice with Gmail.

Keep in mind, however, that no matter what program you use, if you import a contact that has the same email address as an existing entry in your Gmail Contacts list, the newly imported contact will replace the older one.

Adding contacts from Eudora, Outlook, and Outlook Express

If you use a standalone email programs like Eudora, Outlook, or Outlook Express, you’re in luck. They make it easier to wrestle out address-book information than do Web-based mail services like Hotmail.

To import contacts into Gmail, you must first export them as a CSV file from your existing mail program. Here’s how to get started:

Note

These steps should work in older versions of each of these programs. If you’re using a different version and you get hung up, however, search the program’s help system for “Export” or “Exporting” to find the right steps.

• Eudora 6. With the address book open on screen, choose File → Export. In the dialog box, give the file a name, and then choose CSV format and export the file to your desktop or other easy-to-reach location on your computer.

• Outlook 2003. From the main menu bar, chose File → Import and Export to call up the Import/Export wizard. On the first screen, choose “Export a file,” and on the next screen, select Comma Separated Values (Windows). From the list presented on the next screen, choose the Contacts file. Type in name to call the exported file, and then click Export. Finally, save the file to your desktop or other accessible hard disk location.

• Outlook Express 6. From the main menu bar, choose File → Export → Address Book. Select Text File (Comma Separated Values), and then click Export. Save the file to your desktop or some other place where you can easily find it.

Once you have your CSV file safely exported, you’re ready to move the contacts to Gmail:

1. Sign in to your Gmail account and then, on the left side of the window, click the Contacts link.

   The Contacts page opens.

2. Click “Import Contacts.”

   A dialog box like the one in Figure 11-28 pops up.

3. Click the Browse button, mosey to the desktop or wherever you parked the CSV file, and then select it.

   Click Open to return to the importing dialog box.

4. In the importing dialog box, click Import Contacts.

   Gmail imports your list and tells you how many contacts you’ve just added.

Figure 11-28. If you change your mind in the middle of this operation, just click Cancel to end it.

In most cases, Gmail will cheerfully import your addresses into its Contacts list without complaining. But certain things—like bad formatting in the CSV file—will trip it up, causing it to flash an error message at you.

In many cases, opening up the CSV file in a spreadsheet program and fussing with the formatting can take care of import problems. When you open the file in Excel or whatever spreadsheet program you use, make sure the file is formatted as a table. The table needs to include a header at the top of each column, describing what’s in that column: name, email address, and so on (Figure 11-30). If the file doesn’t have those headers, Gmail won’t know what to do with the list.

Figure 11-30. Your spreadsheet can have names all in one column, or it can separate first and last names into their own columns—and it doesn’t matter what order they’re in.

Once you’ve adjusted the table in the spreadsheet program, save it as a CSV file—in Excel, choose File → Save As → CSV (Comma delimited)—and then try the Import Contacts process again.

People are always on the move, and their email addresses may change in the process. If you need to edit somebody’s address information, just open your Contacts page, click the name you want to work on to get a screen with just that person’s name, and then click the “edit contact information” link to open an editable form for that contact. You can add data fields to include phone numbers, mailing addresses, pager numbers, instant-message screen names, and other useful coordinates as described in Section 11.4.1—or you can just edit the information that’s already there. When you’re done, click Save.

If you decide to cross somebody off your list, you can delete the entire contact by clicking the checkbox next to her name and then clicking the Delete button at the top of the list.

The Mail Settings area holds many of the controls for what your messages look like, including:

The Labels settings give you one place to create, rename, or remove the personalized tags that help you sort and organize your messages (Section 11.3.3). Clicking a message name shows you all the conversations that Gmail has grouped under each label.

You can review all of your current mail filters (Section 11.3.4) for rerouting or labeling incoming messages, and also create new ones within the Filters settings area. If you need to change a filter’s action or delete one altogether, you can do so here as well.

If you have multiple email accounts and want to automatically send incoming Gmail to another one of your accounts (Section 11.7.2), turn on the forwarding option here and supply the email address you want to use to collect the rerouted Gmessages.

If you’d prefer to use a POP mail program like Outlook Express or Apple Mail to read your email messages, turn on the POP Download function. (You get to pick whether Gmail keeps copies of downloaded messages, archives them, or trashes them from your Gmail Web window.) Once you turn on POP downloads here, you’ll need to open your POP mail program and add the Gmail account information, as described in Section 11.7.1.

Gmail keeps all the settings concerning your account name, password, and security question here. Although you can’t change your Gmail address after you set it up, you can change the password and the secret question that proves your identity if you forget your password.

You can delete your Gmail account here if you decide you don’t want it after all, or add other Google gravy like having Froogle Shopping Lists (Section 3.2.4) and Google Alerts (Section 5.2.3) sent to your Gmail address.

If you’re tired of dragging your mouse around the Gmail window, try some of these keyboard shortcuts to perform many common commands with the tap of a button. The keyboard shortcuts are optional, though, and you have to tell Gmail that you want to use them in your Settings area. (To do so, click the Settings link at the top of the Inbox page, and then on the General tab, click the button next to “Keyboard shortcuts on.”) Most shortcuts work for navigating around your Inbox window, unless otherwise noted, and all are lowercase letters. (If you don’t have this book handy, you can also find the list of keyboard shortcuts in the Gmail Help area when you’re logged in to your account.)

Once you’ve mastered the simple key shortcuts, you’re ready for the one-two punch of combination keystrokes to jump around your messages and mailboxes:

Considering all that space you get with your Gmail account, wouldn’t it be great if you could use some of it for backing up big files that you could then snag from any Web browser? For example, if you had an 8-megabyte PowerPoint presentation you’d been working on at home and at the office all week, it would be cool to use Gmail as your Web-based file server, rather than toting the file back and forth on a CD?

Emailing yourself a copy of the file every time you make changes can get tedious, but a free little program for Windows machines running Internet Explorer 5 or later called GMail Drive (www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) turns some of that spare Gmail space into a virtual hard drive. The program adds Gmail to the list of drives that you can see in My Computer and lets you transfer files by dragging them onto it—just like any other hard drive or USB flash drive.

After you download and install the program, go to My Computer and then double-click the GMail Drive icon. In the dialog box that opens, type in your Gmail name and password (Figure 11-32). Now, when you drop files on your Gmail Drive icon, they copy over to your Gmail Inbox, just like you were dropping them on a file server or external hard drive.

When you want to grab a copy of a file you’ve backed up to Gmail, just log in to your Gmail account and you’ll see the file in your Inbox with the prefix GMAILFS in the window. If you’re running Windows XP on the retrieving computer, you can also install a copy of GMail Drive there to grab files using the GMail Drive icon in My Computer.

Describing Gmail as “Web-based” email doesn’t give the service full credit, because you can also send and receive your Gmail in a standalone mail program that handles POP mail. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, and it works with mail software like Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and Eudora.

Routing your Gmail through your existing mail program—especially if you have multiple mail accounts that you’d like to check all at once—saves you the trouble of remembering to fire up your Web browser to scope out your Inbox. It’s also a good choice if you happen to prefer your email software to Gmail’s Web interface.

Of course, if you ditch the Web browser window and download your Gmail with any ol’ email program, you lose the neatly stacked Conversation view that’s a big part of the Gmail experience. That’s about the only big thing you lose, though; even if you’re on the road and check your Gmail the old-fashioned browser way, all your messages will still download to your mail program (like Outlook Express) when you return home.

You need to do two basic things to run Gmail in the mail program of your choice:

To adjust your Gmail so that it sends copies of your messages on to your POP mail program, sign in to your Gmail account from your Web browser, and then click the Settings link in the upper-right corner of the page. In the Settings area, click the tab for “Forwarding and POP” (shown in Figure 11-33), and in the POP Download section, set the following:

Figure 11-33. When you’re setting up Gmail to work with your POP program, you can ignore the forwarding settings. If you want to learn about forwarding, see the next page.

When you’re done telling Gmail what you want, click Save Changes.

Next, you have to set up Gmail as an account in your other mail program. The exact configuration steps vary slightly depending on which program you use, but the basics are the same: you need to create a new account in your mail software’s Preferences or Settings area, and then type in information to help the program find your Gmail.

The things you need to tell the mail program about your Gmail account include:

The Gmail server (the computer that’s in charge of Gmail) uses a secure Internet connection and requires authentication to send messages, which means you need to tell it your user name and password every time you want to send a message. Web-based Gmail authenticates automatically. You can have your POP program authenticate automatically, too, by supplying the information in the Outgoing Mail server settings. Figure 11-34 shows some examples of account settings with a couple of different mail programs. You can find specific instructions for just about any current mail program—as well as BlackBerry wireless email devices—in the POP section at http://gmail.google.com/support.

If you don’t want to add your Gmail account to your existing POP mail program, but you would like see your incoming messages without having to log into Gmail, you can auto-forward your Gmessages. Auto-forwarding simply means that the Gmail server always forwards a copy of all your incoming messages to another email address. Auto-forwarding can be helpful if, say, you don’t have access to a computer and are reading your mail on an Internet-enabled wireless phone for the day.

To turn on the auto-forwarding feature, sign in to your Gmail account, and then click the Settings link at the top of the screen. Click the “Forwarding and POP” tab. In the Forwarding section at the top of the screen, click the button next to “Forward a copy of incoming mail to,” and then type in the email address you want to use for collecting your Gmail. Underneath that setting, use the pull-down menu to choose whether to save a copy of the original message, archive it (Section 11.3), or trash it completely. Click the Save Changes button when you’ve adjusted the Forwarding settings to your liking.

Figure 11-34. After you turn on POP Download in your Gmail settings, you need to create another mail account within your standalone email program and give it the information it needs to find and download messages from your Gmail account. Adding accounts in Apple Mail (top) or Mozilla Thunderbird (bottom) requires that you type in your Gmail account name and password. You also need to supply addresses for your incoming and outgoing Gmail in the right fields. You’ll need to turn on the checkbox for an SSL connection—and fill in your user name and password for the outgoing server—to let Gmail’s servers know it’s really you sending the message. Full instructions for most mail programs are at http://gmail.google.com/support.

With people hoping to keep on top of all the 21st century information, it’s no wonder programs known as news readers (or the more wonkish news aggregators) have caught on so quickly. With news-reader software, you can view freshly updated headlines and capsule summaries from hundreds of Web sites all in one window, without having to plod through site after site looking for new content.

These updates are called feeds. Many Web sites—from the New York Times to your favorite rant-a-day blog—have news feeds available to anybody who wants to sign up or subscribe to them. The summary text in the feed includes a link to the full version of the article or post in its original location, which makes it a breeze to scan the headlines and follow though to the full story of the articles that interest you.

There are two popular standards for serving up news feeds: Atom and RSS (which either stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on whom you ask). Some news-reader programs work with both systems. Moreover, some browsers, like Safari and Firefox, have Atom-ready newsreaders built right in.

You may think all of this news-reader stuff has nothing to do with Gmail, but in fact, you can browse summaries of your fresh, unread Gmail messages right alongside your news updates from the BBC and the Washington Post. Then, when you want to read a message, you can just click through to see the whole thing. All you need is a news reader that supports Atom feeds.

Modern Web browsers that work with Atom feeds, like Safari 2.0 and Firefox, can display your new Gmail messages in summary form (Figure 11-35). To find out if your browser can handle Atom feeds, check the Client Software list in the Atom Enabled directory at www.atomenabled.org/everyone/atomenabled to see if your program is on the list.

Adding a feed for your Gmail with Atom-ready browsers is simple. In Safari, log in to Gmail, look at the top of the page for the RSS button and then click it to open a dialog box like the one in Figure 11-36, where you provide your Gmail account name and password so the browser has permission to download and display summaries of your unread messages.

In the Firefox browser, you can see the subject lines of all your unread Gmail messages by making a Live Bookmark to round up the Atom feed. To do so, choose Bookmarks → Manage Bookmarks. In the Manage Bookmarks box, choose File → New Live Bookmark and get ready to do some typing in the URL box. When you’ve warmed up your hands, type in:

	https://yourUserName:yourPassword@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

Figure 11-35. You can have your Web browser give you brief summaries of your new messages without having to log all the way in to your Gmail account.

Figure 11-36. When you set up an RSS feed in your browser, you’re not giving your private info away; you’re simply storing it in a place where your browser can find it, so it can pull down your Gmail messages.

The subject lines of any unread messages now show up in the submenu of Gmail Live Bookmark so you can keep an eye on your Inbox. If you don’t have any new messages, the Live Bookmark fails to load—and sometimes even when you do have new mail, the Live Bookmark is a few messages behind. If you suspect that might be happening, right-click the Live Bookmark and choose Refresh Live Bookmark to update the list.

If your browser doesn’t have an integrated newsreader, there are dozens of dedicated programs that can do the job. Newsreader programs that work with Gmail’s Atom feed include the open source BottomFeeder program (www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder), which works on most Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems out there; FeedDemon (www.feeddemon.com) and NewsGator (www.newsgator.com) for Windows; and Shrook for Mac OS X (www.fondantfancies.com/apps/shrook).

Once you’ve decided which newsreader to use, you need to tell it where to look for your Gmail. While most reader programs come with a stock set of feeds, you can add new ones of your own (look for an “Add new feed” command or button within the program). When the software asks for a URL to use for the new feed, type in https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom to point it toward the Gmail server. (The program also asks for your Gmail account name and password in order to snag your new message summaries.) Figure 11-37 shows an example of a Gmail Atom feed displayed in the FeedDemon program for Windows.

Figure 11-37. Dedicated news reader programs like FeedDemon don’t just give you a peek at your new Gmail messages; they also round up current headlines and news from Web sites around the world to keep you in the loop.