- [Scott] Sometimes
it's the little changes that can have a major impact
on the tools that we use. So in today's video,
I wanna share with you seven hidden features
right here within Gmail so that you can get
more out of your inbox. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And when I say hidden features,
no, these aren't things that you need to use a
cheat code to get to. In fact, most of these features
are found in the settings, but it's my experience that
the majority of Gmail users do not know that these
settings even exist. So I wanna make sure you
know where to find them, what they do so that you can get the most out of your Gmail experience. And we're gonna start
with the reading pane. You're probably used to this
view right here within Gmail where I need to click on an email. Okay, now I've read the email. I can delete it, archive it, add a label and then I'm gonna go back to my inbox. And then I'm gonna open up another email and I'm gonna read it
and do something with it and then I'm gonna go back to my inbox. Well there's a more
efficient way if you like. And if we click on the gear settings here and scroll all the way down, you can see that there's a
section here called reading pane and the great thing about the reading pane is that we can choose
if we want to preview or see those emails on the
right-hand side of the screen. So I can still see all of my inbox here or whatever folder I'm looking at here on the left-hand side, but I don't have to go in and out. I can view my emails here
on the left-hand side and I can read and deal
and reply to those emails here on the right-hand side. Now if you don't like the
preview or the reading pane on the right-hand side, you can also choose below the inbox here. So you can see your emails up top and you can read and deal
with your emails down below. Now if you wanna view
more or change that split, you can just drag this little
area here in the middle to change where that split occurs, but now you can both
see your incoming inbox or your incoming email and you can reply and
respond to it down below. So if you want something more than just the standard no split view, make sure you take a
look at the reading pane. Now the second one on our list has to do with saving even more time. In this case, we want to auto
advance through our messages so we don't have to keep
coming back to our inbox. Once again, we're gonna
click on the gear icon, but this time we're gonna
say see all settings. And at the very right-hand side or near the end of the right-hand side, we wanna click on this advanced tab. At the top of the list, we have something called auto advance and what this is going to do is that after we delete,
archive or mute a conversation, instead of going back to the inbox, we can enable this feature and it's going to take us
to the very next message. So let's take a look at what happens in a normal Gmail setting. Let's say I open up this email and I don't need this anymore
so I'm going to delete it. I'm brought back to the inbox. That's pretty standard behavior, but if we go back to our settings here, I'm gonna click on that advanced tap and I'm gonna enable
the auto advance feature and don't forget to hit save changes. Now it's going to refresh
my Gmail screen here for just a moment, but let
me open up another email here and let's say, okay, I've
read what I need to do here. I'm gonna delete this one as well. I'm now immediately taken to
the next message in my list and in this case, I'm gonna
say, I'm gonna archive this. Maybe there's something in this message that I want to read later. I'm brought to the very
next message in my inbox so no longer am I wasting
time going back and forth and back and forth. I can more efficiently
get through my email by turning that auto advance feature on. Now the third hidden feature
I wanna talk to you about has to do when we make a mistake such as replying to an
email when we're a little mm, hot and bothered or
perhaps just a little angry and then we say, ah, you know what? I should take that back. So we're talking about undo send. Now let's go ahead and
create a new message just by default here. And I'm gonna send it
to a test account here. I'm not even gonna fill
anything in at this case. I'm gonna hit send just to show you here on the bottom left-hand corner, we always have this
little dialog that says okay message sent, undo or view message. Now the undo was there for a
few seconds, but now it's gone. I actually can't undo this message. In fact, even if I go and
hit view message here, I don't have the option to
undo this message anymore. That's because by default, the undo send feature is
set for a mere five seconds so if you don't make that
decision very, very quickly, you will not be able to
take that message back. If we go back into see all settings and about the fourth one
down here on the general tab, we have this undo send setting. Now here's the cancellation period. By default, it is five seconds, but we can extend it all
the way out to 30 seconds, meaning that after we hit the send button, Gmail will not actually send that message until 30 seconds later. I'm just gonna go down to the
bottom of the screen here, the bottom of the page, and hit save changes so I can apply that to my email account. So now let's go ahead and
send another message here. I'm just gonna open this up. Let's choose the same
test account in this case. I'm gonna hit send and you will see at the bottom of the
screen that undo link, this undo option's gonna hang
around an awful lot longer. So I can wait here and say you know what? Didn't really mean to use
that type of verbiage. I didn't really mean to
say the things that I did. You know what? Let's undo that. Let's take that one back. And so now we're brought back
to the exact same email here and if I had put in a subject
or some messaging here, I could now edit it. Maybe take out some of the
words or some of the tone that I was speaking of
in this particular case. So if you want just a, a
little more of a backup, if you want to make sure that you've got just a little more time to think about that email that you sent, you may want to extend this undo send for an extended period of time. Now let's stay on the general tab here for hidden feature number four and that has to do with nudges. Now nudges can be really, really helpful to making sure that you
don't forget about emails that have either been sent
to you with a question or if you've sent someone
else a question, for example, and you haven't heard from them yet. Now in this case, I have
both of them turned on, but let's be clear as to what
each of them actually does. So the first one is
suggest emails to reply to and it says emails you might
have forgotten to respond to will appear at the top of your inbox. So for example, if someone
has sent you an email and it contains a question, but you've never replied to that email, Gmail can bring that
particular message back, maybe after two or three days and say hey, should you reply to this message? Do you want to reply to this message? It will appear at the top of your inbox. So this can be a great way to make sure that you don't forget
anything in your inbox. The second one has more to do when you are waiting for a reply, suggest emails to follow up on. So these are sent emails you
might need to follow up on and they will also appear in your inbox. So for example, if I send you an email and I ask you a question, but
I haven't heard back from you in maybe 48 or 72 hours, Gmail
may bring that message back to say, hey, you know what, you haven't heard back from this person. They haven't answered
you or replied to you. Should you send a follow-up email? Now if you have not used nudges before, I might suggest that you
check both of these boxes and leave them on for a
two or three week period and decide if you're
benefiting from these features. If you do find that they're annoying, maybe you're very good on the follow-up and maybe you have purposely
ignored many of your emails that you haven't responded to, you can always come back in
here and uncheck these boxes, but it's worth taking a look at, especially if you haven't
tried nudges in the past. Now the next hidden feature on our list has to do when you don't
have access to the internet or maybe you know that you're
not gonna have internet access for a period of time. And that has to do with
Gmail offline mode. So once again, if we go into our settings, on the right-hand side of
our tab near the very end, we have an offline tab and
here we only have one option and that is to enable offline email mode. What this is gonna do is
actually store and save a certain amount of your
inbox to your computer so that you have access to those messages. You can even set up and write the replies. They just won't be sent
until you're back online. So couple of things that you
wanna take a look at here. First off, it's going to tell you how much storage it is going to take. So in this case, if I do turn it on, I know it's gonna use just 17 megabytes. I mean, come on. That's almost nothing to
store the amount of email that I want on my computer here. The next option we have to consider is how many emails we want to
store on our local computer. We have three different
options here in terms of time, the last seven days, the last
30 days or the last 90 days. How far back do you want to
go if you are in offline mode? You may need to experiment with this. And you know, sometimes
maybe just the past week is good enough, but you can choose from those
three different durations. Next we can choose if we want to download those attachments or not. Last but not least, you need
to choose after logging out of your Google account, do you want to keep the
offline data on your computer or do you want to remove
it from your computer. Where do you actually go
to view your offline mail? Well once you have set this
up and hit save changes, all you need to do is go to your browser and type in mail.google.com and then you will be brought
directly to your inbox. It'll be an offline inbox, but you'll still be able to
access all of those emails and start to reply even
though you're offline. Now adding or editing an email signature may not sound like a hidden feature, but I find that there are many Gmail users who don't realize that they can add multiple email signatures and
see the benefit of doing so. So once again, if we go
into all of our settings and on the general tab,
we wanna scroll down to near the very bottom of this screen and we'll come to the signature area. Now here you can see I've
got my default signature here and you can edit it any way that you like, but you can have as many
different signatures as you want. So for example here, I've
got a second signature which I like to respond to for
a different purpose, right? Maybe I have a different tagline, maybe I want to include different links or different promotional
links within this, depending on whom I'm sending it to. The other benefit of
having multiple signatures is that you can use them
for different purposes such as for new emails versus
reply or forward emails only. So for example, I'm gonna
create a new one here and I'm just gonna call
this one a reply email and I'm gonna say create. And then here I'm just
gonna say something like, you know, Scott F, maybe something really,
really basic like that. That's all I want it to say when I'm replying or forwarding
to an email, just like that. So now down below when I come
to my signature defaults, I can say okay, for new emails, yeah, I want you to use my signature, but when it comes to reply or forwarding, I want you to use my reply
email, just like that. So now I can come down
here and hit save changes and that behavior will be there. However, it gets better. So for example, I'm gonna open up and start a brand new email and
at the bottom of the screen, you can see that we have
this little pen icon which is actually an
insert signature function. So by default, here is
the correct signature that I want for most of my emails. But if I come down here and
select insert signature, I have access to all of my signatures. So maybe I want that second
one, Scott Friesen number two, and maybe I wanna add some
further details here as well. You can have as many
signatures as you want. You can even choose to turn
off the signature altogether, depending on that message, but the flexibility of having and managing those multiple signatures can be great even if you're only using
a single email address. Last but not least, my
final hidden feature has to do with getting
more out of your menu here on the left-hand side. Often we have a large
number of labels here and even if I click the more option here, I still need to scroll
to see all of my options. And let's be honest. This isn't even that
many labels altogether. In many cases, it's this chat
and rooms and meeting options or these areas that take up
an awful lot of real estate. Well what if I don't
make use of chat or meet? Even if I minimize this, it
might still get in the way, depending on how many labels I have here. Well if we go back into
our settings and say see all settings, all we need to do is click
on the chat and meet option and we can turn both chat
and we can turn meet off. We can turn chat to off and we
can say hide the meet section in the main menu. I'm gonna select save changes. I'm gonna be brought
back to my main screen. And now they are gone. Now I've got full access
to everything here on the left-hand side. Now I would love to hear from you next. Which of these seven hidden
features were your favorites or did I miss something from my list? Be sure to let me know in
the comments down below. Thank you for watching today's video. I hope you like and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity
channel and remember, being productive does
not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
