Here are 6 tips to improve your email efficiency with Gmail. For all our clients on Google Apps (that would be everyone if at all possible) but for now its just nearly everyone….here are some things to check in your Gmail settings to make sure you are getting the maximum email speed factor from your Gmail system.

1. Enable Send and Archive in Labs

2. Enable Key Board Short cuts – (the reason for this is not obvious)

3. Consider switching to the ‘Priority Inbox’

4. Enable ‘Reply All’ by default.

5. Create your email Signature

6. Enable ‘Undo Send’ in Labs

Here is the detail on why and how to implement these:

1. Enable ‘Send and Archive’ in Labs

By enabling this setting on your gmail the following button will appear on your email editor:

When you reply to an email you can either send or ‘SEND AND ARCHIVE’.  Send and archive is much more efficient because it automatically removes the thread from your inbox until one of the recipients replies back to you.  This stops your inbox getting cluttered with emails that you are currently dealing with but where the ‘ball is not on you court’ at the moment.  The Google term ‘Archived’ is different to Outlook.  In Google terms, Archived means the email is still there readily accessible in your mailbox, just not visible on your inbox screen.  You can find it any time by using the Gmail search function which is simple and effective.  In Outlook terms ‘Archived’ means you may well need a certified Microsoft Technician to help you get it back.

To enable ‘Send and Archive’ click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen, see here:

Then hit the ‘Labs’ tab at the top, then scroll down and enable the ‘Send and Archive’ Lab from the list.

2. Enable ‘Keyboard Short cuts’ – (the reason for this is not obvious so read on)

There are a whole bunch of keyboard short cuts that can speed up using Gmail – here is a link to Google’s list of keyboard shortcuts – which is interesting…BUT the best thing about enabling keyboard short cuts is that it causes this little marker to show up against emails you are looking at when you do an search on your mailbox.  See below on the first email….there is a little blue marker at the left edge.

This marker shows the email I just looked at – so if I do a search, then check an email but its not the one I want, I click back to the search and I can easily see the last one I checked.  This really does make it a lot easier if you are searching for a particular email or content.

To enable keyboard short cuts, click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen (as above) and in the ‘General’ tab, click ‘Keyboard Short cuts On’.

3. Consider switching to the ‘Priority Inbox’

The ‘Priority Inbox’ presents your emails in a different way to what your are probably used to.  It splits your inbox into three sections:

First it shows ‘Important and Unread’ emails.  These are emails you have taught Gmail to know are important because you have previously marked a similar email as being important or Gmail has worked it out based on the recipients and senders of that email.  So this is everything you have not checked out yet that you definitely want to deal with first.

The second section is ‘Starred’.  These are all the emails you have read and marked with a star.  All these emails are effectively ones you need to deal with or want to keep in view in your inbox until you archive – or better still, respond to the email and click ‘Send and Archive’ as described above.  So this section is effectively ‘work in progress’ or your ‘to do list’ of emails.

The third section is called ‘Everything Else’ – when you have been using the Priority Inbox for a few weeks you will quickly find this section is full of circulars, junk and not really very important stuff and there’s loads of it!  So, if you want to save lots of time you can just delete it!  You will find there are many emails in this section, which normally, if you are not using the priority inbox are distracting you from the really important emails you need to deal with as a priority.

The Priority Inbox is a great way of saving time dealing with unimportant emails.  To enable it click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen (as above) and then click the ‘Inbox’ tab at the top and select ‘Priority Inbox’ from the drop down.

4. Enable ‘Reply All’ by default.

The standard Gmail setting when you reply to an email shows a button on the email you are reading at the top right which is a single ‘Reply’ arrow.  If you want to reply to all recipients you have to click the drop down next to the button and select ‘Reply All’.  We have found that the majority of our email replies are ‘Reply All’ emails so to make the ‘Reply All’ button show as default like this:

click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen, then click the ‘Labs’ Tab at the top and scroll down to enable the ‘Reply All’ tab.

5. Create your email Signature

You can create a signature to appear at the bottom of all your emails.

If you have already created your email signature you can do it here:

To save time we include the sign off, if it needs changing I can edit it in the email before I send.

To create a signature click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen and in the ‘General’ Tab scroll down to ‘Signature’.  Note you can create different signatures for different mailboxes if you have more than one mailbox set up.

6. Enable ‘Undo Send’ in Labs

This is a biggy!  How many times did you hit send and then just remember something else you wanted to say, or something you forgot to attach?  ‘Undo Send’ leaves a message a the top of your screen for a few seconds  – see here:

If you want to ‘bring the email back’ just click on the links and hey presto – your email is back, no damage done, you can edit your email and resend, or start over again!