Tricks for Taming Gmail

no_mail

Another functional post. With my continued anxiety with the news in Europe, just not in the mood for creative writing. Lucky you! So, here’s some ‘good for you’ gmail tips to make your day. Unless you know it all. You’re not one of those know it all’s, are you?  Of course not.  Let’s commence to gmailin’!

Tip 1) Periods are you friend! Wait, that sounds creepy. I’ll explain. When you signed up for gmail, you probably thought you just got 1 email address. Well, you got hundreds, potentially thousands. How? Gmail doesn’t care about how many periods you put in your account name. abc@gmail.com is exactly the same as a.b.c@gmail.com or ab.c@gmail.com for that matter.  Limits?  Well, you don’t want to put a period at the start or the end or multiples in a row because this might confuse the email handlers. How do you use all these email addresses? Well, you could use them for multiple twitter accounts, or amazon accounts, or as some odd kind of filtering tool. Heck, you could implement a dang morse code system in your very own email address (but don’t, that WOULD be creepy).

Tip 2) ‘Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but unsubscribe me, maybe!’- Well, sorta. People who you know rarely include an ‘unsubscribe me’ link, nor do bill collectors or bonafide service notifications. So, create a filter to autoarchive and label any email with ‘unsubscribe’ in the message. This will keep your inbox surprisingly clean, and you can periodically review the label to see if anything good came in.

Tip 3) Note to Self. You probably already email yourself reminders and important documents. (If not, bonus tip!) What you may not have thought about, however, is boomeranging yourself. Boomerang for Gmail is a browser add-on that lets you schedule ‘reminder’ emails, to yourself or others. I really don’t like to use it to remind others. Seems a bit rude and spammy to send automated emails, but do what you want. I use it to remind myself, and it works pretty good for that. Boomerang for Gmail

Ok, so, I’ve satisfied my Rule of 3 obsession, so that’s all for today. Hope something here helped. Helped me think about something different for a while, which I probably needed. Back to obsessing over the news now.