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Gmail. Another great service from Google apart from its World famous search service. Most of the people who used Yahoo have jumped onto the Gmail bandwagon for better benefits. For starters, you can direct all your mails to Gmail so that you have to just visit your Gmail to keep in touch with everything else.

What I am doing here is to let you know those invaluable and precious tips that I have used for all these years to make your Gmail a better place to live in.

Gmail Offline – Outlook’s not the only one where you can access your mail offline. Clients like Thunderbird offer you to setup Gmail and access mail offline.

Use that extra Gmail Webspace of yours – Lets say you have a lot of space left in your Gmail drive. Why don’t you use it for better purposes than wasting them? Like upload stuff so that you can free up some space on your local hard drive. Use clients like Gmail Drive (For Windows) and gDisk (For Mac) to get started.

Watch Videos, Photos Or Get the ‘Beta’ Logo Back on Gmail – You can do all this on Gmail. Gmail will display all those apps similar to the ones on your personalized home of Google. Just goto Settings and click Labs. Enables the ones you want and click Save changes.

Rapid Response – If you are a company/popular personality, then this feature might be very useful. First, enable canned responses under the Labs tab. When writing a mail, click the Canned Response next to the Attach file option and click New Canned Response.  Create templates with the most common messages you use on your mails and save them. You can also select Auto response accordingly.

Unblock Files To Send Them – This is not allowed according to the Gmail Privacy policies. But when there is an urgency, you can rename the file to TXT if it is a file like EXE, DLL etc. But don’t encourage this habit. Tell your recipient to rename it back to its original extension.

Get Mails From Other Accounts – You can retrieve mails from other accounts. Goto Settings and then click the Accounts tab. First enter the mail address and then enter the password of that email account. Next enter the POP3 server address for the respected mail address. The mail provider will have all this in your account configuration. After filling up the required, click Add account and thats it. Your mails will be got accordingly.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts – Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are the shortest and the simplest that I have ever come across. Hit C to compose a new message, ! for spam and J and K for the mail list navigation. Head over here to know all the shortcuts.

If you have a slow connection speed, you can always switch to the basic HTML version which can be invoked by clicking the same on the bottom of the Gmail page.

Use Labels to Sort Mails – Unlike Yahoo, Gmail uses a feature called Labels instead of Folders. Select More options and click New Label. Just open a mail and click the required label. Your mails will be sorted under the particular label.

Pushkar