How to Be a Gmail Power User
Gmail has a lot of powerful tools that aren’t so well known. Here are a few that will take your Gmail game to the next level.
Undo Send
Shoot, you realized you misspelled your recipient’s name just as you hit Send? Well, you can undo that mistake. Sort of.
To set up Undo Send, go to Settings, then General. A few items down, you’ll see Undo Send, where you can set your cancellation period to 5, 10, 15, and 30 seconds.
What’s actually happening is that Gmail is delaying your message, essentially giving you a short cancellation window. But it works for those last-second changes.
Schedule Email
Maybe you don’t want people to know you’re working late. Or maybe you have a lot of emails to send but don’t want to inundate people. Whatever the reason, scheduling email is a useful tool.
If you want to schedule email, instead of clicking the blue Send button at the bottom left, click the down arrow next to it. Then click Schedule Send. You’ll see a window with three default options, which will include tomorrow morning and tomorrow afternoon, but you aren’t married to these. At the bottom of the window, you can click Pick Date and Time, and from there you can customize any date and time you want.
Self-Destructing Email
Technically, this is called confidential mode. Say you want to send a picture of your roommate in an embarrassing outfit. Or say you have more mature problems, like emailing an engineer on your project some proprietary plans. Whatever the case, you can make sure your email can’t be forwarded, copied, printed, or downloaded. You can also set an expiration date, and you can even require an SMS passcode to see the email.
This is simple. At the bottom of your email composition window, which has the blue Send button on the bottom left, you’ll see a row of icons. The one that looks like a lock with a timer next to it is the Turn Confidential Mode On / Off button. Click this button to enable confidential mode on this email, set an expiration date, and toggle the SMS passcode requirement on and off.
Use Canned Responses
If you find yourself sending the same email over and over again, can it. That is, create a canned response that you can easily send.
To set up canned responses, first you go to Settings, then Advanced, then toggle Templates to On. Then click Save Changes at the bottom.
Now you can write your canned responses. Select the Compose button and write out your canned response. Then click the button with three vertical dots that’s next to the garbage can, bottom right. In the drop-down menu, select Templates, then Save Draft as Template. You’ll be prompted to give your template a name.
The next time you want to use your template, click the same three-vertical-dot icon in the Compose window. As before, select Templates from the drop-down window. Now you’ll see your saved templates and you can click the one you want to use.
