Everyone wants their correspondence to be organized. We are all drowned in email every day. You can spend hours sorting through the countless ads, reports, newsletters, and messages piling up in your Gmail account.
You can choose your own way to deal with them, but we recommend that you spend some time and effort mastering the “king of email”. Gmail actually has a lot of features that not everyone knows about. With new features constantly emerging, it can be difficult to prioritize and keep up.
In this article, we’ve picked out some of the more useful hidden Gmail features that you might have missed. Learning how to use them will help you structure your email communication. Let’s get started with how to create a group email address in Gmail.
Create a group email in Gmail
If you regularly send emails to the same people, learning this trick will save you a lot of time and effort.
To send a group email in Gmail, you first need to create a mailing list with all the contacts you want to include. You can later edit these groups by adding or removing contacts.
How to create a mailing list
Google has a separate app for managing all of your Gmail contacts. This is why to create a Gmail mailing list, you first need to create a list in Google Contacts
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- Open the Google Contacts web app.
- Select the contacts you want to add to the same group from your contact list.
- Once you have selected your contacts, find the Manage Shortcuts icon at the top of the screen and click it.
- Select New Shortcut from the drop-down menu.
- Name the shortcut. Make sure the name is easy to remember, as this is what you will use to identify the mailing list later.
- Click Save to create the list.
To manage the list, select it from the Shortcuts menu on the left side of the screen. There you can delete existing contacts from it. To add contacts to an existing list, go back to your contacts, select a contact, and click the Manage Shortcuts icon to select the name of the existing list.
You can create as many lists (or labels) as you like for different groups of people.
How to send a group email
Now that you have a list of email addresses, send your first group email and see how much easier it is than copying and pasting it individually.
- Open Gmail.
- Click the + Compose icon to compose a new email.
- In the new message window under “Start typing your contact list name”. Gmail will recognize it and fill it in for you.
- When you click on the offer, you will see that all contacts from your list will automatically appear in the recipient field.
- Fill in the subject and the rest of your email. Then click Send to complete your first group email in Gmail.
More Gmail Tricks to Boost Your Productivity
As with any software, Gmail has tricks and shortcuts that can help make your communication more effective. Some are less obvious than others. Learning how to use the following Gmail features will increase your productivity and help you better organize your emails.
Send Schedule
This feature allows you to write emails that you want to send later. Then you can schedule them to be sent anytime in the future.
When you have your email ready, instead of clicking the Send button, click the down arrow next to it. Then select the date and time from the Send Schedule menu.
Smart Input
Smart Typing is ideal if you need a little help from Gmail when writing messages. It predicts the words and phrases you are about to write next and gives you suggestions. This can save you a lot of typing time.
To enable this feature, go to your Gmail settings. In the General section, scroll down and find Smart and Smart Personalization Creation. Make sure both of these options are enabled to receive personalized writing suggestions.
Cancel Submission
All popular messaging apps already have the option to recall a message you sent by mistake. Now you can do this in Gmail too. However, in Gmail, you only have 30 seconds to do this after clicking the Send button.
To set it up, go to your Gmail settings. In the General section, scroll down until you find Undo Submit. Here you can select the period for canceling sending, from 5 to 30 seconds after sending the email.
Confidential Mode
You can go even further with the privacy mode feature. Remember how Facebook lets you send messages that self-destruct after a certain amount of time? Now you can do the same in Gmail.
Before sending the email, click the padlock to the right of the Send button. You can then set an expiration date for that email so that the recipient cannot forward, copy, print, or download it.
You can even set up additional security and require the recipient to enter an SMS code that will be sent to their phone before they can open your email.
Nudges
If you receive a lot of emails every day and often forget to reply to them, you will love the Nudges feature in Gmail. It will automatically revert your old emails back to your inbox with suggestions to answer or continue.
To enable this feature, go to your Gmail settings. Scroll down under General until you find Nudges. Then click one or both of the boxes to enable suggestions.
Become a Gmail Professional
Whether you’re an advanced Gmail user or just getting started, it’s helpful to learn some basic tips to get the most out of the platform. Start by learning how to sort your inbox and how to block someone in Gmail to better organize your email.
What other useful features have you discovered in your time using Gmail? Share your experience with us in the comments section below.
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