100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days
Tip #109 - Gmail Changes
One of the things I love about the Google folks is that they are always trying to think up ways that they feel can improve your computer experience. You may not agree that all of their "improvements/changes" are better but generally you have a choice of whether or not
you want to implement these changes.
Google announced this week (June 2015) that you now have an Unsend option...but you have to move quickly, it's only available for about 30 seconds...and it doesn't say "unsend" it says "undo". Well, I guess this is better than nothing. You'll see it at the top center of your screen, just above the inbox messages. Clicking on Undo will retrieve the message from wherever messages to and open it for editing...or deleting. While you're in your inbox you might want to check out the settings mentioned below. They might make your Gmail life a little easier to deal with.
I was looking at my Gmail settings, something I recommend you do occasionally. When I clicked on the gear icon in the upper right of the Gmail screen I noticed "Configure Inbox" was a choice. I didn't remember seeing that before so I clicked on it.
The resulting dialog box was very interesting. It was offering me the opportunity to have tabs appear along the top of my Gmail inbox. I checked off a few of the choices and then clicked on the Save button. Lo and behold my inbox had tabs along the top and emails in each of the newly created tabs. Google initially determines which emails belongs in which tab. It seems to be based partly on who sent the email and partly on the content of the email.
 Primary | Messages from friends and family, as well as any other messages that don’t appear in other tabs. |
 Promotions | Your deals, offers, and other promotional emails. |
 Social | Messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, gaming platforms, and other social websites. |
 Updates | Notifications such as confirmations, receipts, bills, and statements. |
 Forums | Messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists. |
If a message appears in the wrong tab, you simply drag the email up to the correct tab. After you move a message to a different tab, a message above your inbox will ask if you want to undo that action or choose to always put messages from that sender in the tab you chose.
Conversation View
While you are looking at your Gmail settings, you might want to consider turning the conversations feature off. The conversations feature is on by default and it groups all of the emails that relate to the same conversation into a stack automatically for you, with the newest message at the top. A conversation will break off into a new thread if the subject is changed or there are more than 100 messages. Until you get used to it, and some people never seem to get used to it, you can feel that you are losing messages. It can get confusing if you have sent an email to a group and there has been a lot of back and forth messages.
If you would like to turn the conversation view off, click on the gear icon in the upper right side of the Gmail screen and choose Settings. Scroll on down and click the circle to the left of "Conversation view off". Whew, I can see many of you relaxing a little bit right now.
As long as you're in the settings area, scroll on down and review some of the other choices. For those of you who like using keyboard shortcuts, there is a feature to turn them on/off. Clicking on the blue "Learn more" option will reveal a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts you can use in Gmail. There might be other things you can turn on/off to make your life easier.
Labs
When you want to see what may or may not become a standard feature of Gmail, you should click on the Labs tab in the Settings window. As their heading describes this section, it's "some crazy experimental stuff." You might learn to love something only to see it disappear or you could be an early adapter who can say, "yeah, I know about that...been using it for months."
Happy Computing
Diane
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