Have You Tried These Amazing Gmail Tricks?

A very useful feature that adds an extra layer of security to your Gmail account, when 2-Step verification is enabled, a user has to login with his credentials as well as enter a passcode randomly generated via an app on his/her mobile phone.

Gmail has evolved a lot since its launch in April 2004. It has been preferred by several people across the globe due to its simple, intuitive user interface, and some other features like automatic sorting of messages, or automatically marking a message as important, or even for its superior ability to block spam.

That's what Gmail looks from outside, but have you taken a deeper look? Gmail has several features that could actually save you a lot of precious time and effort, and make stuff easier.

You can use keyboard shortcuts, search for a specific email by date or a keyword, use Gmail offline, categorize messages as per your preferences, and do a lot more to make your Gmail experience more productive.

Knowing even a few essential keyboard shortcuts would actually make your experience on Gmail much better. It's always faster than hovering your mouse and clicking, and then clicking again. For instance, using SHIFT + C opens a compose window, or by hitting R, one can instantly reply to a message.

If you plan to use such shortcuts, the first thing you'll need to do is to enable them from the General tab on the Settings screen. Once you do that, you can simply press ? to view a complete list of keyboard shortcuts offered by Gmail.

Got an account on another email service? You can easily import messages from any other email account to your very own Gmail account. Additionally, you can also receive or send messages from Gmail on behalf of your other account.

This means, a mail sent to your other account would show in your Gmail account, whereas you can also send a mail from your Gmail account such that it appears to be sent from your other account.

To achieve this, go to Settings and select Accounts and Import tab. Then, in the Check mail from other accounts (using POP3), click Add a POP3 mail account you own. On the next screen, enter the complete email address of your other account and click Next Step.

Now, enter the complete password, and click Add Account. On completing this process successfully, you'll be asked if you want to send mail as this address, to which you can click yes if you wish to use this function.

No, Internet connection is not an issue anymore, especially when you have an email service that works offline as well. You can download the Gmail Offline add-on from the Chrome store and access all your cached messages as well as draft new messages that would be sent when you're reconnected.

Though you must be aware of this feature, you can do a lot more than just enter keywords to search a specific mail. The search bar allows you to search mails by the sender's name, or date on which the mail was received. Apart from this, you can also get all the mails before or after a certain date. To do this, you need to type before/after:yyyy/mm/dd.

For example, you can type before:2015/10/26. This will fetch all the mails before the specified date. This feature is useful when deleting a chunk of very old messages, or organizing a group of messages.

Likewise, you can also use the Advanced Search feature to add more parameters to your search like From, To, Subject, Has the words, Doesn't have. You can even refer to different ways to search messages on Gmail.

The new user-interface of Gmail categorizes emails into three default sections, namely Primary, Social, and Promotions. However, you can organize your emails into custom-made categories. Following the three tabs is a tiny + sign. Click it to add a new section. You can then drag an email from a default section to the new section.

Gmail would then display a prompt asking you whether you'd like to apply the same filter to future messages. If you click yes, similar messages would show up in that tab in future.

Though this feature is still in its experimental stage, it's surely worth giving a try. At least there's a chance to rectify a messed up message, sent accidentally. To do this, go to the Labs tab in Settings, you'll need to enable the Undo Send tool. Once you've enabled it, navigate to the general tab and choose the delay interval (which is 5-30 seconds).

Using this feature, you can try to revert a sent mail. This helps when you've accidentally sent a message to the wrong recipient, or sent a wrong message to a recipient. Try your luck with this.

Though this feature is not core Gmail, it gets integrated from Google+ as Google allows users to access all its services through a single account. However, this feature is really useful to group contacts as per the frequency of conversations, or under professional and personal, and the like.

When any person from a particular group emails you, you'll see his/her message under that particular circle.

To access Circles, click on the Circles list on the left pane of your inbox. All your groups or Circles are listed here, you can choose to edit them, hide or show them.

A very useful feature, especially for businessmen or entrepreneurs who work right off their email. If you frequently received jobs to be done on email, you can easily convert these into a to-do-list.

To convert an email to a task, check the box on the respective message's tab, click on More in the pane below the search bar. In more, select Add to Tasks, and the email will pop out in a new window in a list form. However, clicking on the task will redirect you back to Gmail and open the respective message.

If you are into sending bulk emails, you should surely consider this feature. You can tweak this under the General tab in Settings. Look for an option saying Reply Behavior and enable Reply All.

If you're suspecting of someone hacking into your account or illegally accessing it, you can easily find out by using this feature. A lot of us may not have even noticed this option, it's located at the bottom right of the page worded as Last Account Activity: X minutes ago. Below this you'll see a tiny Details option underlined.

You can click on it to find out a detailed list of IP addresses that accessed your account along with the respective time. This feature would help you know whether your conversations are being monitored.

You must be quite delighted to know about so many features provided by Gmail that you were completely unaware of. Now that you know them, go ahead and use Gmail the smart way.