Five productivity enhancing features for Gmail users

Ever since its beginning, Google has introduced some revolutionary steps in many of our social and cultural behaviours quite unnoticeably, and of course most of them are positive ones. And today when we look about 10 years back, the way we access information and news, and the way we interact and communicate have completely been changed. Gmail is also one of free service offered by Google for communicating through emails, and majority of email users are using as their email service. Gmail has always been different and more productive than other email services (as per my own views and experience), and continuously working to make it even more efficient.

Here I want to share some new features by Gmail which I think are quite handy, however most Gmail users may not be knowing and missing some time saving and productivity tools.

Now you can have 11 other types of stars, or more precisely icons beside any email notification, in addition to Gmail’s basic yellow star. These are to remember or categorize different type of emails in order to remember them. But you have to first select the stars you want to use in the Gmail setting, in General Tab. And once set you just keep on clicking at the blank star just left to email notification, till the star type appear you want to use.

Quite often many you would have thought of inserting the some photograph instead of attaching it as separate file, but would unable to do it when composing email on browser. Those of us, who are using Microsoft Outlook as email client would be more familiar with inserting image. But it was not possible in web browser until recently, when Gmail has added this functionality also for Firefox or Chrome users. The method to do is that

1. Just copy any image file on you computer or you can copy image from any website.

2. Go to the Compose screen of Gmail

3. Right click on the writing space and click on paste

Your image will be inserted in the message body instead of attaching it as separate file.

Note: It is better to use this in Firefox as you can even resize the inserted image by dragging image sides or corners. Amazingly the resizing the image is not possible in Chrome which Google’s own browser.

From its start Gmail has introduced Labels instead of Folders unlike other email services. Labels are a fantastic way of categorizing your email. However previously it lacks the ability to have nested labels; nested labels give you the ability to organize labels hierarchically. However, just recently Gmail has also provided this feature as well. Now nested labels are enabled for everyone along with sticky collapse/expand state and easy editing options.

To start using them, you can either create a new sub-label from the dropdown menu on the left hand side or just move an existing label under another one using the edit option:

Internet message access protocol (commonly known as IMAP) is one of the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval, the other being the Post Office Protocol (POP). Virtually all modern e-mail clients and mail servers support both protocols as a means of transferring e-mail messages from a server. Gmail is also providing this feature since long, but now it has introduced some advanced controls for IMAP. Initially a Gmail Lab product, feature provided a very useful set of advanced controls for those of you who access Gmail through IMAP clients (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, or smartphones like your iPhone’s native mail app). Now it’s easier to take advantage of features like syncronizing only some selected labels or applying limits on folder size to improve your IMAP experience.

Quite often many you would have thought of inserting the some photograph instead of attaching it as separate file, but would unable to do it when composing email on browser. Those of us, who are using Microsoft Outlook as email client would be more familiar with inserting image. But it was not possible in web browser until recently, when Gmail has added this functionality also for Firefox or Chrome users. The method to do is that

1. Just copy any image file on you computer or you can copy image from any website.

2. Go to the Compose screen of Gmail

3. Right click on the writing space and click on paste

Your image will be inserted in the message body instead of attaching it as separate file.

Note: It is better to use this in Firefox as you can even resize the inserted image by dragging image sides or corners. Amazingly the resizing the image is not possible in Chrome which Google’s own browser.