Google released Gmail to the general public 3 years ago as a free advertising supported mail service. Over the years Google has developed the service to be even better by adding in extra services such as Google Chat, an instant messaging service and plug-ins from Google Labs. Google now provides more than 5.7million Gmail accounts worldwide.

However when transferring from a client-based system such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, many users have struggled to get used to the new interface. Here are some handy tips and suggested Google Labs add-ons to help you to make more of your Gmail account:

1.) Labels and Filters

If you like to use folders to keep your mail in order you can use labels and filters to produce a similar system. To do this select all the messages that you would like to appear under your Label then select ‘more Actions’ > ‘Filter messages like these’.
Now you can specifiy what the filter is looking for.
For example, if you wanted to filter all the emails you received from ‘Bob’ you would set the filter to label all emails from ‘bob@yourdomain.com’.

If Bob also sends you email from his personal Gmail account which you also wanted to filter under your label you would enter ‘bob@yourdomain.com OR bob@gmail.com’.

Once you have decided how you want to filter messages you need to select what you want to do with the filtered results. In this case we want to send all the messages to a label, although you can also mark as read, send them to spam, delete them, or star them.

Once you have selected to send them to a label you need to choose which label to send them to. If the label already exists select it from the dropdown menu, if not, select ‘create new label’ and enter the details for your label. If you want the message to only appear under the label and not be stored in your inbox as well, make sure you tick the box “skip the inbox” as well.

If you want all the messages you have already received which fit the filter to be added to the label, then also make sure you tick the box ‘also apply filter to X conversations below’

Finally click ‘create filter’.
Now all your messages fitting the filter terms will be stored under the label you created which is displayed in the menu on the left hand side of your screen.

2.) Creating a file structure.

Now you have your labels acting as folders you might want to create subfolders. For example if you had a folder for household bills, you might want to create sub folders for telephone bills and electricity bills. This can be done using the Google Labs tool ‘Nested Labels’, found by selecting the green flask in the top right of your Gmail window.

Once this tool is enabled create the label and filter as you did previously in tip number 1, however this time when you create the label make sure you name it ‘folder name/subfolder’, e.g ‘bills/electricity bills’.

3.) Drag and drop file attachment

When trying to quickly create an email with an attachment which you have just created, rather than going through your computers file system to find the attachment files, you can instead drag them from their current position and drop them straight into the attachment area in the compose email screen to upload.

4.) Canned Responses

If you have to send the same email on a regular basis you can save yourself having to type it out every time by saving it as a ‘canned response’

To do this select compose a new message and create your message as you would like it to be sent but do not add a ‘To’ address.

Now select ‘canned responses’ from the tool bar. If ‘canned responses’ doesn’t appear, you need to enable it in Google labs by clicking on the green flask in the top right of your screen.
From the canned responses drop down select ‘new canned response’ you can now give your canned response a name and save it so it can be used in an instant from the canned response drop down when next required.

5.) Using an Email Client

If you have tried all of the above and would still prefer to use your old client such as Apple mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook, this is also possible.

First go to your Gmail settings in the top right hand corner of your Gmail page and select ‘Forwarding, POP and IMAP’ and enable IMAP.

Now open your client and select to add a new account, now you can use the details provided in the table below to add your account to your prefered mail client.

These details can also be used to add Gmail to devices such as smart phones.