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● This is a continuation of how to optimize your email suite using the General
Settings:
● To access the General Settings:
1. Click on the gear button in your Gmail
2. Click on ‘Settings’
3. From the ‘General’ tab, you can access the following:
a. Desktop Notifications
b. Keyboard Shortcuts
c. Button Labels
d. My Picture
e. People Widget
f. Create contacts for auto-complete
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1) Desktop Notifications
● The Desktop Notifications setting controls whether or not a desktop pop-up appears
when you have new mail.
● You can set the importance level to include, and notify you of, all mail, or just mail
you have marked as important in the past. For example, if you have email from you
boss marked as important, that will show up, but maybe not email marketing
messages. If you’re into working fast and lean, I’d recommend turning them off
altogether - otherwise you’ll spend all day getting distracted by email pop-ups.
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2) Keyboard Shortcuts
● To see all the email shortcuts available, type ‘SHIFT+?’, and an overlay will display
all available keyboard shortcuts.
● I typically use the ‘r’ to reply to email, ‘e’ to archive, ‘c’ to compose a new email, and
‘TAB+RETURN’ to send email on a daily basis.
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3) Button Labels
● The Button labels turn on and off the visual labels for the toolbars within Gmail.
● For new Gmail users, the symbols can be confusing, but once they pick up on what
they do most often, like archive, and so on, it’s less frustrating.
● If you want to read the labels, switch the Button labels to ‘Text’.
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4) My Picture
● Associating a picture with your account is a great way to communicate with others,
while managing your online identity.
● You can choose from almost any image, and set it as your own account picture.
● To be consistent, and lessen confusion among those you work with, try to keep to
the same image in all your online services.
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5) People Widget
● The people widget goes hand in hand with the My picture feature, in that Gmail will
display a widget with the contact’s information, and picture if available, in
conversations.
● It allows you to quickly determine who is in a conversation, especially when more
than a few are in on the email chain. From the widget, you can easily manage your
contact information about that person, see related emails, start a Hangout, chat, and
send a new email.
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6) Create Contacts for Auto-Complete
● Send an email to someone, once, and they are automatically added to your contact
database.
● The next time you need to email that person, just start typing their name, and it
auto-completes it.
● You can also choose to manage your own contacts, if you’d like.
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7) Importance Signals for Ads● This controls your ads experience if you’re in a regular @gmail.com account, which
is what keeps it free for you to use.
● Spend some time with the settings by clicking the link, and make sure you tailor the
ads to your liking. If you’re part of a Google Apps for Business or Education, you
probably won’t see any ads, and won’t need to worry about this setting at all.
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8) Signature
● The signature is inserted automatically at the end of your email. Many like to style it
with different fonts, colors, etc. but I prefer mine a bit simpler.
● Many email systems today tend to strip out fancy signatures anyways, especially if
you add graphics to the signature portion of your email, so I keep away from that
altogether. Verdana makes a nice font, but the choice is yours, of course.
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9) Personal Level Indicators
● The Personal level indicators highlight how you were sent a message - as part of an
email mailing list, to you as part of a group, or to you directly.
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10) Snippets
● The Snippets function allows your peak into an email before opening it - it displays a
bit of the opening line of the email, so you’ll have a better idea of what’s waiting
inside.
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11) Vacation Responder
● The Vacation responder is great when I’m away any length of time, and won’t be
able to access email.
● Either way, a yellow bar is displayed at the top of your email window to let you know
the Vacation responder is on.
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12) Outgoing Message Encoding
● Each time you send a message, Gmail automatically selects an appropriate
encoding for the language in which you've composed your mail. It's possible,
however, that the contact may not be able to see the email the way you intended it
to be formatted.
● If your contacts are having trouble viewing messages you've sent them, Google
recommends using 'UTF-8' (Unicode) for all outgoing mail. UTF-8 is a standard
encoding that's accepted by most email clients, like Outlook. This is especially true if
you often communicate outside a set standardized system, like company email.
However, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, unless you get grief about problematic
looking emails.
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