Email remains the go-to mode of official communication in our world even today. However, dealing with the large number of emails can be quite a task when you’re used to WhatsApp, iMessage and Instagram DMs. To combat this, here are five Gmail tips that will help you control and conquer your inbox in 2023. These will help you do everything from using keyboard shortcuts better, to finding and deleting bigger messages that are taking up precious space.
Check keyboard shortcuts
Did you know Gmail lets you hit Send without needing your mouse, using just Ctrl+Enter? Maybe you also didn’t know that you could add a strikethrough in your text with an Alt+Shift+5 combo. Gmail is full of neat keyboard shortcuts just like these.
What’s better? Gmail also lets you check all of these shortcuts quickly by pressing Shift+? On any Gmail window. Open this shortcut menu enough times and soon you may not need it anymore.
Find (and delete) big messages
Getting all your email to fit under Google’s 15GB free storage can be a challenge if you get a lot of mail with large attachments. Of course, this isn’t an issue if you opt for more storage at a price using a Google One plan, but if you don’t, Gmail has a nice trick to find only the large messages in your inbox so you can select them all at once and get rid of them.
Simply go to the search bar in your inbox and type ‘size:xm’ (without the inverted commas). Note that the ‘x’ here stands for any value in MBs. So, if you were to type ‘size:10m’, you will find all messages above 10MB, while ‘size:20m’ will show you all messages over 20MB and so on. You can choose your own threshold and delete all messages that cross the line.
Get all your newsletters, work emails, etc in one place
Newsletters getting mixed up with your regular mails? Here’s something you can use to get ahead of this. Gmail ignores anything after a ‘+’ in your email ID. For instance, apple@gmail.com, apple+banana@gmail.com and apple+grapes@gmail.com, will all be delivered to the same email ID, which is apple@gmail.com.
You can use this Gmail ignorance to your advantage. When signing up for any newsletter, enter your email ID like this – your.email+news@gmail.com. The extra ‘+news’ before the ‘@gmail.com’ is the trick. This way, the newsletter will be delivered to your.email@gmail.com, but when you want to search for just the newsletters, you can search for those delivered to your.email+news@gmail.com and find all newsletters in one place. You can use similar versions of your email address for other purposes like your.email+work@gmail.com or your.email+realestate@gmail.com.
Use coloured stars to mark emails
You may already be using the star marks that Gmail offers to mark important mails that you can come back to later, but did you know you could further organise all star-marked mails by colour? Gmail allows you to use coloured stars to segregate between different categories.
To set this up, head to Gmail Settings> See All Settings> General> Stars and drag the coloured stars you want from the ‘Not in use’ section to the ‘In use’ section. You will find five additional colours to the default yellow star, as well as six other icons like a red exclamation mark and a purple question mark.
Send messages as attachments
You can forward emails as attachments in another email. This is ideal when you want other parties to see an email as it was received by you, and you want to use something more professional than the traditional screenshot. When composing a mail in a smaller compose window on the bottom right, use the larger background view to navigate to your inbox, and search for the mails you want to send as attachments.
When you find them, click on the checkbox next to one or more emails that you want to sent as attachments and then simply drag-and-drop these mails into your bottom-right compose window to add them as .eml attachments.