12 Gmail Tips Everyone Should Know in 2021

Gmail is one of the most popular email services globally: it has more than 1.8 billion active users.

Its popularity doesn’t come as a surprise: It’s Google’s free email, is powerful, and includes free storage. 

But it’s also easy to get lost in it. Gmail’s interface has so many features that it can be hard to keep up with what’s going on and can be confusing.

Here are some Gmail Tips and Tricks you should know about in 2021

Pop-up your email — and move it around

When you want to compose a new email in Gmail, the new message opens up a small screen by the right side of the browser. 

One of my pet peeves is that you cannot move the screen or read the text behind it, which is too uncomfortable!

Thankfully, it is easy to get around this by using the full-screen option and holding the SHIFT button simultaneously. This pop-out the new email message into a window that you can move around the screen.

Mute emails

Some emails you want to delete, but others you want to keep. But if those kept emails are clogging your inbox, you can prevent them from showing up in your Inbox by Muting them. 

Mute will allow you to keep the emails but they won’t be in your inbox!

Snooze until…

Some emails you need to deal with — but you would rather do it later.

That’s when Snooze comes in. Thios feature allows you to pick a date and time in the future where those emails will pop up again so you don’t forget to deal with them.

See all your Unread emails

When your inbox gets jammed with emails, it can be too easy to miss the unread ones.

Fortunately, there’s a way to sort and group the Unread emails — and even exclude Promotions to get a focused inbox.

Send large attachments while on Gmail

When you send large attachments via the traditional way, with the paper clip icon, you may end up using too much of Gmail’s free storage. Instead, you can use the “Insert Files using Google Drive” feature to share big files without Gmail space. 

This feature is also helpful for groups of people working on the same document: you don’t need to attach the file to share the latest version of a doc.

Setting up Gmail Templates

We all tend to have emails that we tend to reply to in the same way with the same info.

This is time-consuming and frankly, just silly.

With Gmail you can set up Templates and use these to quickly reply to those emails at a touch of a button.

Setting up Gmail Signatures

Talking about templates, you can also save different Signatures for each message. Gmail allows you to customize and swap signatures depending on if it’s a new message or if you’re answering on an existing thread.

Schedule emails to send

The scheduling feature allows you to send your emails at a future date and time. This can be used as a reminder method when you email yourself or can be great to set up automatic emails to customers and friends wishing them a happy birthday.

Turning on Confidential Mode

Some emails need to stay as confidential as possible. Gmail has a Confidential Mode which allows you to restrict the email from being downloaded, copied, forwarded, or printed.

Additionally, Confidential Mode enables the email to require an SMS passcode and allows you to set an expiration date. 

Confidential Mode won’t prevent the recipient from taking a picture of the email with their phone, but it goes a long way in protecting its initial purpose: it should only be for a pair of eyes.

Gmail Undo’s cancellation period, extended

You probably have sent that email you wish you could grab back. Fortunately, even after sending, Gmail allows users to retrieve emails with the Undo tool. 

By default, every time you send an email you have 5 seconds to cancel that email and “undo” it.

This time is very restrictive.

However, when you enter into the settings, you can change the default UNDO time to 30 seconds which is more than sufficient to change your mind!

Gmail, offline

Gmail is a web-based browser, and emails are stored in the cloud. So what if you needed to check your inbox but were offline?

You can enable offline mail in Gmail to make sure you can still scroll through your inbox.

Of course, you need to ensure that you have enough hard drive space before turning it on!

Forward Gmail’s emails

If you prefer to use your non-Gmail email address, you can set up a special rule. This rule will forward all your incoming Gmail emails to your new address. 

This gives you the ability to still keep your Gmail email but without having to log into the Gmail.com website.

So, in summary:

All of these Gmail features are already available and require no additional installs. All you have to do is follow the steps in the video above!