Turn Gmail into a better mail client with these tweaks
Outlook is no longer the world's most commonly used mail client -- that honor now goes to Gmail, which is broadly used by both consumers and businesses alike. For a program with such deep market share, you'd think Gmail would be pretty polished. You'd be wrong. Anyone who has ever transitioned from Outlook can tell you that Gmail is a relatively inelegant service lacking apparent table stakes. Thankfully, you can fix that.
Specifically, you can unlock a number of "stealth" features using something called Gmail Labs. Gmail Labs is really just a sort of beta feature control panel; to get to it, click Settings in the gear icon (on the top right of the screen, under your profile icon) and then click the Labs tab. Here you'll find close to two dozen options, but they are not all created equal. A few are particularly noteworthy.
Auto Advance is one of the features you'll wonder why you have to go out of your way to enable. Ordinarily, Gmail doesn't advance to the next conversation when you delete or archive a thread. With Canned Responses, you can teach Gmail to go forward or back to the next or previous conversation.
Canned Responses lets you create email templates for quick replies. If you have a few boilerplate responses that you frequently send, use this tool to create snippets of text (or even more lengthy replies) that you can pick from a list and insert into email messages. Canned Responses lets you create snippets, edit, delete, and insert them into emails as needed.
Keyboard Shortcuts allow you to specify hotkeys to perform a wide variety of operations -- from opening a new blank email message to switching views to marking email as spam. Indeed, keyboard shortcuts are a significant source of pain for Outlook users switching to Gmail, so this can make things feel a little better. You still won't be able to press the Delete key to delete email messages, but you can tell Gmail what other key you'd like to use for that task.
Preview Pane takes the relatively primitive default view offered by Gmail and makes it look more like Outlook and most other email clients. Turn this on to see a preview pane that shows the contents of the selected message. You can set the preview to horizontal or vertical.
Undo Send is perhaps the most useful Labs feature. It does exactly what it sounds like; emails are delayed for a short time, giving you the chance to recall an email sent in error. Undo Send isn't like the Recall feature in Outlook -- it can't retrieve an email that has actually left your inbox. By default, you get 10 seconds to change your mind (adjustable up to 30 seconds via the General tab). That's often enough, though, to recover from a horrifying mistake, like realizing the wrong people are on the cc: line the moment after clicking Send.
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Dave Johnson is editor of eHow Tech and author of three dozen books, including the best-selling How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera. Dave has previously worked at Microsoft and has written about technology for a long list of magazines that include PC World and Wired.
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