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12 Gmail Tips & Tricks For Productivity

I’m going to share with you 12 Gmail tips & tricks and hidden features to boost your productivity. For example, confidential mode, undo send, vacation responder (out of office auto reply), custom business email, multi email signatures, and much more!

Tip #1 - Dark Mode & Gmail Themes

Alright, tip number 1 is you can pick up a theme or enable dark mode.

To turn on the dark mode you can simply go to the settings in the top right corner and click on View All.

If you pick a theme from here you're going to have the option to Adjust the Text Background, Make the corners Darker, and you can also blur the background.

If we scroll down, we're going to have solid colors and here we have the dark theme option that we can select.

This way we're going to have a dark background with light text which is a lot more comfortable on the eyes.

Tip #2 - Reduce Space Usage

Tip number 2 is you can reduce the storage that your Gmail account takes.

Gmail includes 15GB of free storage, and that's shared with Google Drive and Google Photos When your account reaches its storage limit, you won’t be able to send or receive emails.

So if your Gmail is using a big portion of that you’ll have different options:

The first step is to delete emails with large attachments.

Simply go to the search bar and click on the Search Options and set the size to Greater than 10 Megabytes and search.

Now you’re going to have a list of large emails that you can go ahead and delete. This is one of the easiest and best ways to quickly clean up your Gmail storage space.

The next step is to make sure you avoid the full storage issue in the future and to do that you first need to unsubscribe all the unnecessary emails, and then delete all the old ones. And finally, instead of attaching files, you can Insert Files Using Drive.

Tip #3 - Reading Pane

Tip number 3 is you can add a reading pane to Gmail to make it faster and more comfortable to go through all of your emails.

When I open an email, it's going to take all of my screen and I no longer can see the inbox.

However, if I go to the top right corner and click on Toggle Split Pane Mode, I can have the horizontal or vertical split which makes it easier to get through all of my emails.

Tip #4 - Access Gmail in Outlook & Other Email Apps

Tip number 4 is you can access your Gmail in Outlook or any other email apps.

To do this we can go to the settings and click on See All Settings.

The next step is to go to the Forwarding and POP IMAP.

You have the option to set up automatic forwarding by adding an email address or you can enable the POP download or IMAP access.

POP can only be used for a single computer and emails aren't synced in real-time. Instead, they're downloaded and you decide how often you want to download new emails.

On the other hand, IMAP can be used across multiple devices, and emails are synced in real-time.

Simply enable and click Save Changes and Next go to the other email app like Outlook and Add your Gmail account and you're all set.

Tip #5 - Undo Send

Tip number 5 is Gmail allows you to undo send an email.

To do this you need to go to all the settings and under General, there's the option to set a cancellation period of up to 30 seconds.

What this means is once you send a message, you have 30 seconds to stop the email from going out.

By default, it's set to 5 seconds but I recommend selecting 30 seconds.

So next time you sent an email and you decided to undo the message you can select Undo at the bottom left corner and undo send your email.

Tip #6 - Vacation Responder (Auto Reply)

Tip number 6 is you can set a vacation responder in Gmail. So if anyone emails you while you're out, they'll get an auto-response. To be able to use it, you need to go to All Settings and under the general tab, at the end of the page, we have our vacation responder.

The vacation responder sends an automated reply to incoming messages. If a contact sends you several messages, this automated reply will be sent at most once every 4 days.

You can go ahead and turn it on and select the first day and either select the last day now or manually turn it off when you're back to work.

Here you can enter a subject like ''On Vacation'' and here you can type your message.

Once you're ready click on Save Changes and whoever emails you will now get an auto-response.

Tip #7 - Multiple Email Signatures

Tip number 7 is you can have multiple email signatures in Gmail.

A signature gets attached to the bottom of your emails and to insert a signature when you open a new email, there's the option to add your signature at the bottom.

Once you click on that, it opens a menu. As you can see right now we don't have any email signatures but we can go ahead and click on Manage Signatures to get started.

So we're in settings, under the general tab and now we can Create A New Signature.

First, we can give our signature a name like Default and click on Create.

We can enter our signature and under the Signature Defaults section, we can decide if we want to use it for new emails or on replies and forwards.

Here's a bonus tip. If you're adding signatures to your business emails you can create another signature and call it a promotion.

So next time you send emails to your clients you can insert this signature to offer a coupon code and increase your sales.

Tip #8 - Gmail Templates

Tip number 8 is you can set up Gmail templates to make responding to emails easier.

So let's say we got negative feedback from a customer and we want to reply with a professional response that can be used in the future as well.

So we're going to thank the customer for their feedback and explain the situation and we can offer a coupon code as well.

So to create Gmail templates, first, we need to go to all settings and under the advanced tab, we're going to enable Templates.

Next, we're going to click on the 3 dots on the right side and open Templates, and Save the draft as a new template.

So I highly recommend creating a few templates because in the long term it's going to make responding to the emails so much easier.

Tip #9 - Create Infinite Gmail Aliases With ''+''

Tip number 9 is you can create infinite aliases using the + sign in Gmail.

You can insert a PLUS with a word at the end of your username (but before the “@” sign) and the emails will still come to your email address.

Gmail doesn’t look at what comes after the plus sign so you can create infinite aliases and make it easier to organize your inbox and locate your emails.

For example, next time you sign up for a newsletter you could use “youremail+newsletters@gmail.com” or keep all of your subscription services together with “youremail+subscription@gmail.com“.

If you want to mark all of the newsletter or subscription type of emails you can create a filter by going to the settings, Filters and Blocked Addresses, and Create a New Filter.

You can simply enter your email address plus subscription or newsletter @ gmail.com and click on Create Filter. Finally, you want to select Skip The Inbox and Mark As Read and create the filter.

Tip #10 - 10 Keyboard Shortcuts - Confidential mode (Set Expiration) - Create Custom Business Gmails (Bonus Tip) - 13

Tip number 10 is you can use shortcut keys and take your email management to the next level.

If you hold the Shift and Question mark you're going to have access to a list of Gmail keyboard shortcuts.

At the top, you see all the shortcuts that are enabled by default but if you wanna take your Gmail management to the next level you can enable these extra navigation shortcuts.

Simply click on enable and you're going to have the advantage to use them as well.

Tip #11 - Confidential mode (Set Expiration)

Tip number 11 is you can set an expiry date for your emails and make them confidential and also you can set passwords to protect your emails in Gmail.

So from the compose box you can go to the bottom of your email and click on Toggle Confidential Mode. As you can see it says Recipients won’t have the option to forward, copy, print, or download this email.

Now you're going to have the option to set an expiry in 1 day up to a few years and also you're going to have the option to Require a Password which is going to be a separate email from Gmail that provides the passcode.

Finally, you can click on Save and turn on the Gmail confidential mode for this specific email.

Tip #12 - Create Custom Business Gmails

Alright, tip number 12 and the final tip is you can create a custom Gmail address with your domain name for free.

So rather than having your name@gmail.com, you can have info@yourname.com which is more professional.

So when you buy a new domain, Gmail is going to offer $10/month for a custom email but I'm going to share with you how to do it for free.

So once you're in the email section under your domain you can Add up to 100 free email aliases under the Email Forwarding section.

As you can see it says Email forwarding allows you to set up alias email addresses which are alternative addresses that are used as a substitute for an actual email address. Add up to 100 email addresses or a wild card (*) address that forwards to your existing email address.

So we can go ahead and click on Add email aliases and enter or alias email as well as the existing recipient email.

Now, this is going to take 15 minutes to set up and I want to keep this video short.

But the good news is I have a full tutorial video about how to create custom emails that you can watch right now and build your professional email address.

I'll leave it at the end screen as well as the top right corner so make sure to check it out.

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If you have any questions comment below and I’ll try my best to help you out.

Thank you!