Chapter 18
IN THIS CHAPTER
Sending a message as plain text
Configuring how you reply to messages
Customizing Gmail's default text style
Taking Gmail out of Conversation view
Telling Gmail to let you know when it labels a message as Important
Giving Gmail permission to display desktop notifications
Gmail offers a relatively simple interface on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you see that the app has a deeper side. I'm talking about the Settings page and its seemingly endless supply of options, configurations, and customizations. I mean, there is a lot of stuff in there.
Yep, sure, lots of the settings should be labeled For Nerds Only. However, there's a veritable treasure trove of settings available that are actually useful in the real world and can help you be more productive, more efficient, healthier, wealthier, and wiser. (Well, maybe not those last three; but you never know!)
In this chapter, I take you on a tour of ten eminently useful and practical Gmail settings related to the two main Gmail tasks: sending messages and reading messages. Prepare to be amazed!
Sending email seems like such a simple thing: You click Compose, insert an address or three, conjure up a snappy Subject line, write the message itself, and then click Send. What more could there be to say about such a straightforward procedure?
Well, quite a bit, as it turns out. Gmail actually comes with quite a few settings that can make sending stuff even more useful. This section takes you through a half dozen (minus one) settings and features that you'll want to add to your sending toolkit.
You can use one of two message modes when you send an email:
What's the use of this plain-text mode? It's rare nowadays, but there are still some very old or very simple email programs that choke when faced with rich text. If you send a rich text email to someone and that person complains that your text is just a gumbo of incomprehensible symbols, you need to resend your message using plain-text mode. Here's how it's done:
Click More Options.
More Options is the three vertical dots near the bottom right corner of the New Message window. (It's pointed out in Figure 18-1.)
From the menu that appears, click to select Plain Text Mode.
Gmail adds a check mark to the left of the command, as shown in Figure 18-1. Gmail also removes all formatting from your message text.
When you choose the Plain Text Mode command, Gmail strips out all your existing text formatting and throws it away. You might think that turning off plain-text mode would restore your previous formatting, but no, that's not happening. Therefore, if you have an elaborately formatted message, think twice before turning on the Plain Text Mode command.
Click Send.
Gmail sends your plain-text message.
As you learn a bit later in this chapter, when you open a message, Gmail offers a Reply button that you click to send a response to the person who sent the message. If the message was sent to two or more people and you want to send your response to everyone, you have to click the More button and then click Reply All.
Lots of people find that they use Reply All more often than Reply, so that extra click of the More button becomes a bit of a bother. Fortunately, you can ask Gmail to switch things around and make Reply All the default button and make Reply the button you access by first clicking More. Here's how:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
For the Default Reply Behavior setting, click the Reply All radio button, as shown in Figure 18-2.
To revert to having Reply as the default, click the Reply radio button instead.
In Chapter 2, I talk about archiving a message —moving the message to Gmail's All Mail folder. The usual archive procedure is a 2-step affair:
If you find yourself performing these two steps over and over, you can quickly talk Gmail into combining them into a single step:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
For the Send and Archive setting, click the Show “Send & Archive” Button in Reply radio button.
To revert to the default behavior, click the Hide “Send & Archive” Button in Reply radio button instead.
Now when you click Reply or Reply All, the resulting message window, shown in Figure 18-3, includes both a Send button (the one on the right) and a Send & Archive button (the one on the left). If you click Send & Archive, Gmail sends the reply and automatically moves the original message to the All Mail folder. Sweet squared!
Earlier in this chapter, I talk about how you can format your message text with a different font, text size, color, and other attributes. If you find that you're continually making the same text formatting adjustments, you can save some wear-and-tear on your fingers by setting those adjustments in the Gmail equivalent of stone. Gmail offers a Default Text Style setting that includes the font, type size, and text color. Here are the steps to follow to change this setting to something that suits your typographical style:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
For the Default Text Style setting (see Figure 18-4), use the Font, Size, and Text Color controls to format the text as preferred.
Under these controls, the text This is what your body text will look like shows the result of your labor.
If you make a mess of it, you can start from scratch by clicking the Remove Formatting icon (pointed out in Figure 18-4).
One of Gmail's default settings is that when you send a new message to — or reply to a message from — someone not in your Contacts app, Gmail automatically adds that person's email address to the Other Contacts section of the Contacts app.
Why would Gmail do this? Because, that way, the next time you start to enter that person's email address in the To, CC, or BCC field, Gmail displays the address so that you can select it rather than type the whole thing. This is called auto-completing the address.
That's a laudable reason, for sure, but it does mean that you'll end up with tons of potentially useless addresses in the Contacts app. Sure, those addresses are tucked away in the Other Contacts section, but if you really don't want all those addresses accumulating, you can turn off address auto-completing by following these steps:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
Reading messages in Gmail seems like another just-this-side-of-trivial task. After all, to read a message, you click it and then peruse the text, in either the message window or the reading pane. Done and done, right? Not so fast. Gmail has lots of settings you can use to customize the reading experience to suit your style. The rest of this chapter takes you through five of the most useful.
By default, Gmail organizes messages by conversation, which refers to an original message and all of its replies, replies to replies, and so on. That's a sensible setup because it makes it easy to see the trend of the conversation and locate a particular reply. Conversations also keep your inbox neat, because the entire conversation resides within a single “message” in the inbox.
Still, many people don't like organizing messages by conversations because all the messages are “hidden” within the original message. These people prefer to see all their messages out in the open.
If you fall into this camp, you can follow these steps to turn off Gmail's default Conversation view:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
Gmail monitors how you use the app and the messages you receive as a way of figuring out which messages are important and which aren't. If Gmail's analysis tells it that a message is important, Gmail automatically adds the Important label to the message, which means that you can view the message outside of the noise of your inbox by selecting the Important label on the main menu.
That's mighty handy, but there's a fly in this soup: The only way to know whether Gmail has declared a message to be important is to view the contents of the Important label. That is, Gmail offers no indication in the inbox about which messages are important and which aren't.
If that seems just plain wrong to you, here's how to fix it:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
For the Importance Markers settings, click the Show Markers radio button, as shown in Figure 18-7.
If you think it's creepy that Gmail is analyzing your messages for importance, I hear you. Fortunately, you can turn off this snooping behavior. On the Inbox tab, click the Don't Use My Past Actions to Predict Which Message Are Important radio button, and then click Save Changes.
Gmail's labels can end up with a ton of messages in them. Gmail handles long message lists by dividing the list into separate pages, with up to 50 messages (or conversations, if you're still using Conversation view) per page. Depending on how you work, 50 will seem like either a ridiculously large number or a ludicrously small number.
Either way, the number isn't set in stone, and you can follow these steps to set a different maximum page size:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page with the General tab displayed.
By default, Gmail doesn't display a notification on your computer's desktop when a new message comes in. That's probably just as well because many studies have shown that the notification of a newly received message (and its accompanying “ping”) is a big distraction and, therefore, a major productivity killer.
That said, you might want to risk the distraction anyway and give Gmail permission to display desktop notifications. It's also possible to configure Gmail to show a notification only for messages labeled as Important, so consider that a compromise worthy of consideration.
Here are the steps to follow to give Gmail permission to display desktop notifications and to configure those notifications:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
In the Desktop Notifications setting, click the Click Here to Enable Desktop Notifications for Company Mail (where Company is the name of your business).
Your web browser asks if you want to allow mail.google.com
to show notifications, as shown in Figure 18-9.
If you receive a ton of mail from mailing lists and similar group messages, it's handy to differentiate between messages you receive via the list or group and messages addressed to you directly. (Differentiating messages in this way has the added benefit of improving spam detection, because many junk messages are sent as bulk mailings.)
For the messages you receive, there are actually three addressing levels to differentiate here:
It's not universally true, but from your perspective, the preceding list can be treated as an indicator of increasing message relevance. That is, messages sent to a mailing list or group are more likely to be not all that relevant; messages you receive that were sent to multiple people are likely to be more relevant; and messages sent only to you are likely to be the most relevant.
Gmail has a feature called personal level indicators that reflects this relevance hierarchy:
If this sounds like a sensible arrangement, follow these steps to start using personal level indicators:
Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings.
Gmail opens the Settings page, with the General tab displayed.
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