Gmail Tip

I've been using Gmail for years, and against my advice, most of my family hesitated to ditch their stale ISP-issued email accounts for correspondance (ie: Comcast.net). Thank goodness most of them have finally seen the light and migrated over. Are you (or someone you know) a newly coined Gmail convert? Then share this post with them, or bookmark for later reference!

• Tired of those boring text-only signatures or canned responses coming from your Gmail account? Take note: Gmail supports rich text signatures! Add links, colors, images, or formatting to your Gmail account signature, or any other account you've set up to send from Gmail. It's super easy to set up — just head to your settings page, scroll down to the Signature section, and design away!
• You can drag and drop attachments in Gmail, but did you know you can also select multiple attachments, find attachments in search, and view attachments online?

See more handy tips after the jump.

Don't you love it when the most obvious solution to a problem is right in front of your face? I recently had to search through my nearly 30,000 Gmail messages to find a message with a specific date, and a general search wasn't returning the result I was looking for.

With a little help from friends on Twitter, I discovered the "Show Search Options" link to the right of the Gmail search bar. Clicking it reveals a host of helpful options, including the ability to search by sender, date, attachment, subject, and more. It's extremely helpful if you (like me) are less than diligent about labeling and filing emails in your inbox — I just used it to find all of the family photos my mom has ever sent.

Google's Undo Send for Gmail feature debuted as a Labs feature and quickly turned standard — who doesn't want the ability to recall a message you've mistakenly sent before it lands in its recipient's inbox? The default setting for Undo Send is 10 seconds, but with a quick tweak, you can increase the time you're able to undo a message you accidentally sent to up to 30 seconds. Find out how after the break.

Gmail has always offered a steady stream of new features and helpful tips aimed at streamlining your digital life. Recent helpful additions have focused on attachments, and now a new Gmail Labs feature allows users to search for attachments and files using a tool called Apps Search.

The new tool, which users must enable in Gmail Labs to work (go to Settings > Labs > enable Apps Search), changes the "Search Mail" function in your Gmail account to "Search Mail and Docs." When you use the search function within your email, search results will include both email (like you're used to now) and document results, including attachments and Google Docs files. For now, email results show up first and faster than attachments, so if you choose to enable this lab, it won't slow down your search results.

I love how many Gmail tricks there are — especially the one that automatically deletes messages from specific senders before they reach your inbox. For the last month or so my inbox has been overflowing with junk mail and spam. And while I didn't want to close my account, I was getting sick of weeding out 30+ unsolicited emails a day from the ones that mattered. My friend told me about an easy filtering trick that she was using to avoid emails from her ex-boyfriend, which totally works for spammy messages as well. Find out what it is when you read more.

Although my spam folder isn't totally out of control, it does fill up faster than I'd like it to. It seems that no matter how hard you try at keeping your email private — only giving it out on a need-to-know, or sign-up basis — it can end up in the wrong (read: unsolicited) hands.

This little trick is modified from a tip I gave you a while back: you can add the plus sign at the end of your gmail address to sort email into specified folders. This is not only great for organization, but it can also alert you when someone has sold your email address for unsolicited spam. Find out how after the break.

It's simple, it's speedy, and drag-and-drop functionality is, in my opinion, one of the best features any application can have. Now, finally, you can drag and drop attachments while using Gmail. Instead of clicking "Attach a file" and searching for attachments one by one, you can just drag the photo, document, or other attachment onto the message. It works with multiple files, too — so if you have a folder full of photos to share with a friend, just select all of them and drag them over to attach.

For now, this functionality is only available in Firefox and Chrome, but Google plans to roll it out for other browsers "as soon as they support this feature." And to make your life even easier, check out more quick and easy Gmail tips.