5 Gmail Tricks And Tips Everyone Should Know To Be More Productive and Efficient

Gmail is undoubtedly the most widely used emailing service in the world and it's not just because of Google's consumer reach. While other Google services do compliment Gmail, the emailing service has evolved a lot over the past few years and the user experience is the core factor behind this. As a web app, Gmail is constantly being updated, but the amount of hidden features it has is pretty staggering. In this article, we've listed down a few of these tricks that hide in plain sight and will definitely help in improving your productivity. 1. You Can Recall Sent Messages © MensXP We've all been there, sending an email without properly finishing it, sending it without an attachment or sending it to the wrong recipient altogether. What many don't realise is Gmail has a feature that gives you a small window of time to recall the sent message. For this small windows to come you need to activate "Undo Send" feature. Just go to settings via the 'gear' icon, in the "Undo Send" section check the box next to "Enable Undo Send". After enabling the feature, whenever you send a message a small yellow pop-up will be shown underneath the search option stating that the message has been successfully sent. Besides the message, you'll see the "Undo" option. So next time, just select it and your message will be called back, without the recipient getting any notification or warning. 2. Mute Noisy Email Threads © Google We've all seen huge email threads which involve a lot of people and everyone is just replying back to all the recipients in the thread. The casual conversations have mostly shifted to Instant Messengers, but there are always annoying email threads going around at work or with old-school family folks. It's definitely annoying to receive a notification for such conversations. You can simply mute such threads. When you mute a conversation, all future messages from that thread go straight to your archives, skipping your inbox. To start seeing those messages again, simply unmute the conversation. To mute a thread, just select the email and click on the "More" drop-down menu beside the label and folder option. You'll see multiple options to quickly mute such threads or even mark/filter them. 3. Use Keyboard Shortcuts Gmail is full of keyboard shortcuts for just about everything you can do. Right from creating a new message to selecting forwarded messages or almost everything. Here's a small chart to get you started! © MensXP You can also simply press Shift + ? to get a pop-up list of all the available shortcuts. To take this even further, you can also switch up the shortcuts according to your need by heading to Settings and then Keyboard Shortcuts tab to personalize them. 4. Smart Replies In Gmail Mobile App Google has integrated this into their latest redesign, Smart Reply is a machine learning tech that prepares three, short appropriate replies to messages you receive. A single tap on the offered reply adds it to the response window, where you can send it off or write more. This is currently available to the Gmail Apps on iOS and Android. 5. Use Google Drive To Send Large Attachments © Google Drive Gmail allows you to send an attachment of up to 25 Mb with your message. While that file size is large enough for most situations, there may be times when you want to attach a larger file. By using Google Drive with your Google account, you can send larger files through Gmail. First up, upload the file you want to share on Google Drive, then go to Compose and then click on the Google Drive icon beside the attachments icon. You're all set!