11 VERY POWERFUL Gmail Tips

I am 100% sure the information below will blow you away. There are some unique things about Gmail you’ve never heard about.

Crucial Gmail Tips

Tip #1. Create unlimited email addresses with one Gmail account

If you want to keep track of how your email address is used (when you sign up to a newsletter, for example), add “.” anywhere between your user name. This way you’ll create a ‘new’ email address but all the messages from that ‘new’ address will get forwarded to your main one.

So, for example, if you own “example.google@gmail.com” then you can make variations like:

“exam.ple.google@gmail.com” (remember, you just change the username, not @gmail.com)

“e.xample.google@gmail.com” or

“example.goo.gle@gmail.com”

Any email sent to the above ‘new’ email addresses will go straight to ‘example.google@gmail.com’. Why is this useful? If you use this trick to sign up to different newsletter and you start receiving spam, this way you’ll know which newsletter sold your email to spammers.

Another trick is to use +someword after your username and you’ll get the same result as above. Here are some possible variations by using this trick:

“example.google+bbc@gmail.com”

“example.google+newsmain@gmail.com”

All emails sent to the 2 above addresses will get forwarded to “example.google@gmail.com”. You can also use a combination of the above 2 tricks.

So you can design this type of email: “e.xample.google+cnn@gmail.com” without problems.

Tip #2. Organize your Gmail inbox (or create multiple inboxes in one Gmail account)

This is useful if you’re receiving different types of emails every day. For example, you can put messages from friends in one ‘inbox’ and so on.

Well, Google actually calls them labels but they have pretty much the same function like an inbox [actually, you can also take this literally and set up multiple inboxes by activating one of the settings in their labs]:

You can activate this by going to Settings>Labels. Not recommended though, labels are far better ways to organize things.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to set up all messages from a specific email to arrive in a specific label:

Open a message in your inbox. Next to “Reply” you’ll see an arrow:

After you click this you’ll get a window where you’ll need to click “Next step” and then “Apply the label” and choose a label there. Then all the messages from that email will arrive in that label.

To create a label, click on Settings (top right of Gmail window), Labels and there you’ll see the great options

Tip #3. Backup Gmail messages (in the simplest way possible)

I will guess you’re like most people and most of the time you need a backup of your inbox and not your ’sent’ messages. Well, here’s a quick and automatic way to do it: just set up Gmail to forward messages (do it to another email service, like Yahoo because it something bad happens, Gmail can shut down all of your accounts).

How do you do this? Go to settings (top right corner of Gmail window), click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” and then select “Forward a copy of incoming mail to”. Enter an email address there.

Very Useful Gmail Tips

Tip #4. Change ‘from’ name and ‘reply to:’ address

The first one, you might want to do it for privacy reasons. The second one, maybe you sent a lot of emails to a lot of people and need another email to easily manage their responses.

Here’s how to change the “from” name:

Settings (top right corner) > Accounts and Imports > Save Mail As and then click on “Edit info.” The following screen will appear:

See this tutorial on how to change the ‘reply to’ address.

Tip #5. Set up Gmail to show headers (so you can see the IP address of the sender)

Here’s a way to do it:

If you don’t understand what those headers mean, you have good header analysis tools.

Tip #6. Doubt someone else is accessing your Gmail account? Check the ’sign in’ history

Here’s how to do it:

On the bottom on the screen you’ll see “Last account activity”. Click on “details” and there you’ll see a list of the last 5 IP addresses who logged in on your Gmail account.

Tip #7. If you hate organizing everything and want to keep everything minimalistic, then ‘bookmark’ the most important messages

You can ’star’ each message in Gmail and it goes to a special folder which is usually under “inbox”. You can do this for very important messages you think you’ll need in the future.

Tip #8. Activate keyboard shortcuts (you always get things done faster with them)

To activate them, go to Settings > General and look for “Keyboard shortcuts:”

Here’s a useful list of Gmail keyboard shortcuts.

Tip #9. Use the advanced ‘mail search’ options to see all the messages from a specific sender

You can search emails from a specific domain by entering “from:domainname.com” and clicking “Search mail.” You can search emails from a specific sender by entering “From:sender@domain.com”. I’ve included an example below:

Advanced Gmail Tips

Tip #10. Use Gmail to manage emails on your own domain

If you have your own domain (like me) you can set up so the email address you own on that domain gets forwarded to Gmail.

Take a look at Google Apps where you can find out more about this feature.

Tip #11. Send SMS, use canned responses or set up custom ‘vacation time’ autoresponder? Gmail Labs is for you

I could write a tip about each one of the things above (and they’re a small part of Gmail labs.) To take a look at the entire list of tools, go to Settings (top right corner of Gmail window) > and click on the “Labs” tab.