GMail - Google Mail

More information about GMail

Send Mail to Several People at Once

Do you find yourself addressing the same group of recipients over and over? It can be quite monotonous to enter all their email addresses every time. There is an easier way to achieve this.

If you haven't gotten around to checking out the Contacts functionality in Gmail, have a look by clicking on the lefthand "Contacts" link in Gmail. You will now see a list of your contacts with whom you exchange mail frequently, as well as a complete list of contacts, and your contact groups. For every contact, you can provide address or telephone details, along with other private notes on the contact. You can also add a small photo for every contact, or add a contact group.

Creating your own contact group has one major advantage: you will then be able to just type the group name in the Gmail To: field, and see it expand to the full list of recipients. Not only will this save you time typing, it also decreases the chance that you'll accidentally address the wrong person (sending potentially private information) because two of your contacts share the same first name.

To create a new group, switch to the Contacts dialog. Click the button with a plus sign and two people at the top of this box to add a group. Name the group—like "Family" or "Colleagues." Then, select "All Contacts" again, and place a check mark next to those you want in the group. Click on the Groups button, and select your new group from the drop-down "Add to ..." list. Now, when you compose a new message by clicking Compose Mail or hitting c, you can just enter the first letters of the group name and hit Return or Tab to expand the name to all email addresses of this group automatically.

What's with all these ads?

Gmail displays advertisements that are targeted to your emails. This means that when you or your friends talk about, say, indoor sundials (a special device utilizing a rotating lamp to show the time even when the sun's not shining!), the advertisement next to the message may read "Buy cheap indoor sundials" with a link to the sponsor. When Gmail was launched, this stirred up some controversy because people realized that Google's machines would read their email in order to target the ads. The truth is, all web-based email clients must access your mail content in order to store, process and display it, but Google decided to display targeted instead of untargeted ads. The rule of thumb is: as email may contain a lot of private information on you and your friends, only use email clients from companies which you trust to handle this information with care. This is true for Gmail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail and even email that's not web-based: email messages that are sent and received must pass through an email server that's under the control of whomever provides you with email service.

Become a GMail Power User

Gmail—also called Google Mail in countries where there were trademark issues with the name "Gmail"—is Google's web-based email client. As with many other Google services, it's free to use, but comes with context-sensitive advertisements in some places.

Gmail made quite a splash when it arrived on the scene on April 1, 2004, not only because of its then 1 GB of storage, which many people first believed was an April Fool's hoax (Microsoft's Hotmail, in comparison, had only 2 MB at the time), but also because the interface reinvented some aspects of what we usually expect from email clients. Today, Gmail has:

• A conversation view that sorts replies to your mails into a singsle thread.

• Built-in chat functionality, allowing you to switch between email and Google Chat.

• An inbox that instantly displays after signing in (other email clients often show the inbox only after an extra click).

• Labels instead of folders, meaning that you can attach multiple keywords to a single email.

• An expandable storage plan, where you can buy some extra gigabytes if in need (and share the extra storage with other Google applications, too).

• A search function that returns results within split-seconds. Paul Buchheit, one of the inventors of Gmail, said "Everyone here [at Google] had lots of email. This company is a little bit email crazy. I get 500 emails a day. So there was a very big need for search."

While Gmail can do a lot already, people expanded it over time with homemade tools and tricks. One popular approach is to use Greasemonkey scripts. A Greasemonkey script expands your Firefox browser to get a web page to do more than its makers intended it to do. You can also hack Gmail by adding a user stylesheet. And there's an abundance of advanced native features that you can use, like the Gmail search operators—useful even if you get fewer than 500 mails a day—and third-party tools that connect to Gmail.

To sign up for Gmail and get an address in the form of janedoe@gmail.com, go to http://gmail.com and log in with your Google Account.