Gmail doesn’t just send and receive email, If you know where to find them there are dozens of tools to boost productivity and improve your inbox management. Here are my favourite Gmail tricks that not many people know about, let me know in the comments if there’s anything you use that I haven’t included.
1. Find Large Attachments
You can find emails with large attachments easily by using the search bar. Simply type ‘larger_than:10m’ or size:10000000 to find attachments that are 10 megabytes or larger. If you wanted to find a 20mb attachment you would type ‘larger_than:25m’ or size:25000000, and so on.
2. Find Emails By Date
Similar to searching for attachments, type ‘before:yyyy/mm/dd’ or ‘after:yyyy/mm/dd’ into the search bar to search for emails before or after a specific date.
3. Import Emails From Your Other Accounts
Go to the Accounts and Import tab in Settings to import emails from your other accounts using the POP3 settings. You might have several different email address for work, home and your hobby but this way you can access them all in one place.
4. Recall Sent Emails
It almost sounds too good to be true, next time you accidentally send your boss the email meant for your husband you can recall the email within 30 seconds of sending it. To activate this feature go to Settings and click on the Labs tab, then search for and enable the Undo Send tool.
5. Categorise Emails
For an organised inbox, drag and drop emails into the ‘Primary’ ‘Social’ or ‘Promotions’ tab to categorise them by type. Future emails of that type will go straight to those tabs.
6. Group Contacts
You can also sort your emails by contacts. Go to Contacts and then Circles on the left of your inbox and group contacts together. Your emails will then be sorted according to which group the sender is in.
7. Mute Conversations
If you find yourself part of an email chain at work that is not relevant to you, click on More and select Mute from the drop down menu. New emails will still appear in the chain but the conversation won’t be bumped to the top of your inbox every time.
8. Convert Emails Into Tasks
When you need to act on an email you can turn it into a Task by clicking on More and selecting ‘Add to Tasks’ from the drop down menu. A pop-up Tasks window will appear with a new entry and a link to the original email.
9. Offline Mode
Install the Gmail offline Add-On to read emails and write drafts without a Wifi connection.
10. Use Multiple Email Addresses
Case and full stops don’t matter in Gmail addresses, so you can use variations of the same address when you sign up to online services or newsletters. For instance [email protected] and [email protected] are the same address. You will then be able to sort your mail by the email address the sender used.
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