Gmail
Gmail is an email service that allows users to send and receive emails. Emails can be formal and informal. The formal emails are regarding jobs; sending CVs or some important documents. Whereas informal emails are normal emails sent to friends to share notes or having a chit chat. Gmail is helping users all over the world. Communicating with each other is now made easy with Gmail. Gmail is developed by Google and it is becoming popular day-by-day because of it’s cool and interesting features.
At the start. Gmail released a beta version (all called the testing version) on April 1, 2004, with fewer features and the limited capacity of sending messages, but on July 7, 2009, it released a full fledge version packed with more powerful features to help the users in their daily lives.
Initially, Gmail was offering a storage capacity of 1 gigabyte per user, a relatively higher amount offered than the competitors at that time. Today, this incredible service comes up with 15 gigabytes of storage. Users can receive emails of the size up to 50 megabytes including attachments and send emails of the size 25 megabytes. If a file size exceeds the defined limit, then that file can be inserted in the Google Drive and sent to the desired person. Gmail also has a search option where you can search for old messages and can see them. This feature has made our lives easy instead of going through the whole inbox, we can simply search for the specific message and view it.
Gmail has different categories like Inbox, Starred, Snooze, Sent, Drafts, and when you scroll down further you discover Spam, Bin, and many more… Gmail scans for messages and if spam is found, it sends the message to the spam folder. The everyday emails go to the Inbox.
By 2018, Gmail had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. As the days are passing by, they are continuously growing and google’s community is getting bigger and bigger.
Features
Gmail offers many useful features to make your experience exciting, including:
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Spam filtering.
Spam is another name for junk email. Gmail uses advanced technologies to keep spam out of your inbox. Most spam is automatically sent to a separate spam folder, and after 30 days it is deleted. -
Conversation View
An email conversation occurs whenever you send emails back and forth with another person (or a group of people), often about a specific topic or event. Gmail groups these emails together by default, which keeps your inbox more organized. -
Built-in chat
Instead of sending an email, you can send someone an instant message or use the voice and video chat feature if your computer has a microphone and/or webcam. -
Call Phone
This feature is similar to voice chat, except that it allows you to dial an actual phone number to call any phone in the world. It’s free to make a call anywhere in the world at relatively low rates.
Some more Gmail features are:
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Inline Action Buttons
Inline action buttons are seen on a message. When you hover the cursor on an email, you can see four buttons: Archive, Delete, Mark as unread, and Snooze. These inline buttons are an easy way to perform different actions. Instead of checking the message and deleting it, you can delete using the inline action button with ease. -
Right-Click Menu
Gmail’s right-click menu has all that you want. When you right-click an email, you get to see a menu on which there are several options like reply, reply to all, forward, archive, delete, mark as unread, snooze, and many more… These options can be easily used by anyone to perform different tasks. If you want to reply to an email, you can click the reply option and send a reply to the specific person. If you have got an email from a group of people then instead of replying to all of them separately, use the reply to all feature and easily reply to more than one person.
Snooze
If you very busy with your work and can’t see an email at that time. Maybe that email requires a thoughtful response that can be given later when you are free from the work. At that time you have two options: either to stop from whatever you are doing and reply to that message or ignore the message and remember to get back to it. Gmail’s snooze feature is a good approach to this problem.
Select the snooze option and select for until when you have to snooze the message. You can snooze for later today, Tomorrow, This weekend, next week, and on someday. It’s up to you, you can choose the option with which you are comfortable.
Nudge
Gmail’s nudge feature is all that a user wants. Leave the matter of nudge to Gmail, it will handle it perfectly. The Nudge feature notices if there is an email in your inbox which has not been replied for days or whether someone hasn’t replied to one of your queries. If this happens, an inline message appears asking you whether to reply to the email or not.
The nudge feature is amazing as it keeps reminding you of the un-replied messages so that you can follow-up to those messages. Without nudge, we can forget about these messages, and if there is an important message that needs to be replied we can miss that and can be in big trouble. So, always enable Gmail nudges.
Schedule Emails
Don’t miss out on important messages from your friends or colleagues. Schedule emails and set a reminder for a birthday greeting to a friend. Google has upgraded Gmail in such a way that you can send emails later at a date and time of your choosing.
After you compose an email, you get an option of whether to schedule it to send out later or send it right away. You just need to click on the options menu (the three vertical dots) and you will see a drop-down menu. From there select schedule send. After that, you will be given options about when to send the emails example you can schedule it for the morning or you can use a time-and-date selector to select a specific time.
Attachments
Unlike action buttons, attachments also appear inline so that you can easily open them without opening the whole message. This feature makes it easy for us to see attachments and is a time saver.
Confidential Mode
With confidential mode, you can send self-destructing messages to people - the messages that expire with the time of your choosing.
Messages sent in confidential mode doesn’t allow recipients to copy, download, or forward a message. To do so go to the Compose option in your inbox. You’ll see a lock at the bottom click on it and select for the passwords and everything and enter the confidential mode.
Do give Gmail a try and explore more and more exciting features. It keeps on updating to give users a great experience.
Happy Gmailing!