Back in 2004, Gmail rewrote the rules for Web-based email. It had a fast, clean interface, and a jaw-dropping 1GB of free storage. Today, it comes with ten times the amount of space, and boasts many millions of users across the globe.

But even if you use it every day, you're probably not making the most of the features it has to offer. With these seven tips, you can take your Gmail life beyond "power user." You can be an off-the-deep-end Gmail megalomaniac.

1. Let filters do the work

Managing an inbox is no easy task, but Gmail has tools to help. You can turn any search into a filter that can then be actioned: search for emails "from:Facebook", for example, then create a filter to mark these messages as read and archive them (assuming you don't want to know what's happening on Facebook, of course). Or build a filter to match the email addresses of your nearest and dearest, then mark these messages as important to ensure you never miss an email from your better half. Filters can promote important messages and downgrade the clutter before you've even logged in.

2. Make the most of search

You would expect a Google product to excel in search. It's not always obvious, but the Gmail search box has more flexibility than you might think—click the drop-down arrow to the right to see all the options on offer. Look for emails with attachments, then delete these messages if you want to free up some room in your account perhaps. Or, if you're searching for an email from a particular sender, streamline the search with a "TK:TK" command.

If you have a particular search query—emails from your birthday last year, the year before, or any year, say—you can dig them up and relive the moment. Of course, how well this works depends on how many emails you received from friends and family to mark the occasion, and how many were auto-generated greetings from the forums and mailing lists you've signed up for.

3. Split your inboxes

Via the Inbox tab of the Gmail Settings page, you can customize how your emails are ordered on screen and utilize Google's unique Priority Inbox feature. But wait, there's more! Delve into the Labs page and you can activate an Outlook-style Preview Pane (particularly handy on bigger monitors) or a Multiple Inboxes feature.

The latter option adds a new tab to the Settings screen where you can configure three independent panes matching the search queries of your choice. See starred (by searching for "is:starred"), unread (is:unread) and important (is:important) messages alongside each other. Or you can group emails matching three different labels (label:labelname)—the choice is yours. Note: you'll need to deactivate Priority Inbox for Multiple Inboxes to work.

4. Bring in the other email

If you've got a Yahoo or Hotmail email address you use for newsletters and the like, why not import these messages into Gmail too? The Accounts and Import tab of the Settings page makes the process very straightforward, and you can of course mark these imported messages as read or apply a label using a filter. You might even want to import your work emails as a backup.

Here's another tip: enter yourname+anything@gmail.com when filling out Web forms. You can use any word after the plus symbol, and emails to the address will reach your inbox. Once they arrive, you can use the "to:yourname+anything@gmail.com" filter to take appropriate action.

5. Look to the stars

Superstars are available in the General tab in Settings. Up to 12 stars and symbols can be used, rather than just the single default one, and a multiple click on the star icon by a message cycles through them.

Use these multiple stars to split home and work emails, or mark urgent messages, group them by category, or flag them for reminders to follow up. Each star has its own search query too—for a green colored star, it's "has:green-star"—and that can be used as the basis of a filter or a multiple inbox. Hover over any star to see its associated search code.

6. Work the labels

Labels are one of Gmail's best features. Labels make searching through thousands of emails much easier. Make sure you use them.

Remember that filters can apply labels automatically for you if want. They can also help you clear out clutter in your Gmail account too—you can enter "label:newsletter before:2011/01/01" into the search box and then get busy with the delete key, for example, if you have a newsletter filter set up.

7. Extend Gmail's capabilities

There are plenty of third-party apps and extensions that can extend the capabilities of Gmail. Take, for example, Rapportive, which adds details from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter next to your contacts' profiles. It's fast, sleek, and soon feels like a native Gmail feature.

Another of our favorite third-party tools isBoomerang, which enables you to schedule emails to send later and reminds you to follow up important messages after a certain period of time if you haven't had a response.

8. Customize the Density

You might not like the space between the messages in an email list, but you're not stuck with a certain display. Just hit the "settings" cog igon, and you can see more or fewer messages on screen by changing the display density.

9. Make an email a To Do

Sometimes you just can't send a certain email right then and there, but you don't want to forget to do it altogether. Just hit the "More" menu above an email, turn it into a to do task, and schedule it on your calendar.

10. Do the basics better

We have to mention a few basic things about Gmail just to make your mastery complete. You probably know you can click the "+" menu at the bottom of the new compose window, then click the little chain icon to insert a web link into the email. But here's a tip: you can also insert an email link in your email.

And, one last thing about searching, which is a basic email function that's not totally obvious in Gmail. If you want to search a message from a particular sender, type "from:emailname@gmail.com" in the search field.

Top image via Lifehacker.

01:22

It’s totally unbearable and massively inefficient to process countless emails every day. And yet, to have any chance of success in today’s information world, you must communicate via email.

As you succeed, you become more networked, and more dependent on others to achieve even bigger milestones. As a result, your email volume just increases, while higher expectations require even faster responses and decision making. It’s a seemingly impossible cycle.

This is especially true for C-level and executive leaders. I was chatting recently with Suresh Khanna, Chief Revenue Officer at AdRoll, and he said it best: “Management is about making decisions – not executing. You need to delegate execution efficiently. You need to listen and keep everyone aligned on the same page.

“So, when it comes to doing this over email, you mainly serve as an email routing and forwarding agent.”

When I look at how some of my brightest colleagues – working at emerging companies, big companies and VCs – manage their email, I’m blown away by how inefficient their processes are.

Although my own inbox still isn’t perfect, I’ve discovered three email tricks for Gmail (and many of these ideas can be implemented in other email services too) that literally save hours of my life every single week:

1. A one-page inbox view that bubbles what you need to see to the top

Many folks seem to be leveraging Gmail’s Priority Inbox, with the “Important and Unread” messages at the top of their inbox view, then the “Starred” email section right below that, followed by “Everything Else.”

Priority Inbox also gives you the ability to change say the top section to show only emails from a particular label by going to “More options” via the drop down icon to the right of the section title.

This is a wonderful customization feature, assuming you’re auto-labeling important types of emails (which you should be). However, I encountered two big issues with Gmail’s labeled priority sections feature:

1. When you select a label, it will by default show all emails (including read ones) in that section. This defeats the point, as I don’t want to prioritize or clutter my precious inbox view with emails I’ve already read and processed.

2. Gmail limits you to only two labeled sections in the Priority Inbox. If you click “Add section” (in the options drop down above) just once more, and click the options for that new section you’ll see “Remove section” and not another “Add section” option.

Fortunately, there are workarounds for both of these issues. To address the first issue, follow these instructions for showing unread only.

Basically, when you click “More options …” and scroll to the label you wish to register for that particular priority section, before left-clicking the label text, right click it and Inspect the element (in a browser like Chrome) and add “^u” in front of the label name in the source (the instructions explain this). Then, left click the label and it will only show unread emails corresponding to that label.

The beautiful thing about this is that you only have to do this once – this change will persist even if you login from a different computer using a different desktop browser. Very clever. Hat tip to Ben who first surfaced this.

I couldn’t find a solution for the second issue online, so I decided to play around with the code myself. If you inspect “Remove Section,” and change the corresponding act=”z” snippet to act=”n” (highlighted in the image below) and then click “Remove Section,” this will add another new section!

There doesn’t seem to be a cap on the number of sections you can create through this technique, and these changes will persist for future browser sessions just like the Unread trick.

This brings up two questions: What kind of labels should be assigned to these inbox sections? And why should I do this through labeled inbox sections versus traditional Gmail filters? Let me address these with a few examples of labels I use:

“Team to Me”

This is an auto-label/filter I created that basically looks for emails sent from my team members to me – you can filter these with a Gmail search query like “from:(-me@company.com @company.com) to:me@company.com”

You can easily tweak this query to only include emails from say your management team (which makes sense with larger teams) by listing each manager’s email in the from clause.

“Me to Me”

Another filter looks for emails sent from me and addressed to me – which I filter with a search query that looks like “from:(me@company.com OR me@personal.com OR me@anotheremail.com) to:me@company.com”

Despite using great tools like Trello for managing tasks, I can’t stop emailing myself ideas (probably a dozen a day). I still want to see these emails bubble up, but want to prioritize emails from my management team higher.

“Calendar”

It’s easy for your inbox to get filled with calendar requests. You can create a label/filter that searches for this – e.g. “.ics” AND “google calendar” OR from:calendar-notification@google.com.

Now I could have created a filter which skips emails matching this query from ever even hitting my inbox, but the big problem with this is that I still need to read those (it’s important to know which events people are signing me up for). In order to do that if I was using filters, I’d have to go to the left rail of Gmail, find the filter link and click the link to see calendar requests (taking me to a new page) – but that takes work and is very hard to notice (especially with the Gmail/Hangout chat widget taking over most of my left rail, which I like).

Also, when you send a calendar invite out, especially to many folks, you don’t want their replies to flood out your inbox and intermingle with real priority email.

Calendar is a great use case for labeled sections – you can run through your emails, section by section, and know you’re focusing on the important ones first versus burning energy running through emails out of order and wasting time archiving or accidentally reading unimportant emails during periodic email scans throughout the day.

“Subscription”

Emails coming via Twitter (like retweets), New Relic (Performance Dashboards), and so forth are interesting to me, so I don’t want them to skip the inbox, but they are certainly not critical for me to read first.

I found a liberal search filter “from:notify OR from:info” that covers many of these emails. For the subscriptions I don’t want to see, I simply unsubscribe (see below for some tips on that).

Make sure to order the sections from top to bottom in the order you want the emails to be displayed. You might have an email that gets associated to multiple labels, and the exclusive section an email falls into will be the first matching section from the top.

2. Use canned email template responses

Gmail has a nifty lab feature for creating and embedding email templates to speed up your email follow-ups for common tasks. I use it extensively for recruiting follow-ups (screenshot below), common legal contracts, and meeting requests – check out these instructions, which are very easy to follow.

3. Proactively unsubscribe from unwanted mailing lists

Lifehacker has this tip for mass identifying mailing lists and filtering them out of your inbox. Personally, I prefer to just manually unsubscribe from each mailing list by clicking the unsubscribe links at the bottom of these messages. That way, I don’t miss any mailing lists I do like seeing.

Personally, I’ve found that Gmail’s “Report Spam” feature is not aggressive enough. I’ll still get similar emails from that mailing list coming through over and over again despite repeatedly..

Given the recipient is the same, it’s better to filter these out anyways and use “Report Spam” for the hard emails which are difficult to capture with search-based filters.

If you unsubscribed from a mailing list but it’s still haunting you, it might be because the first unsubscribe associated you to another email address (that happens to be forwarding over to yours).

Let’s say that email address is test@company.com. When you click the unsubscribe option for a future email from that mailing list, this time addressed to test1@company.com (your primary email address – say the list has both of your email addresses) it might be associating the unsubscribe click to test@company.com (the earlier email) because of a cookie it dropped in your browser.

If that’s the case, I found sometimes clearing out your cookies or opening the unsubscribe link via an Incognito window (in Chrome) can do the trick. Unfortunately, some mailing lists don’t properly enforce unsubscribes or even provide options to do so (despite CAN SPAM laws).

It sucks to do, but just do it and be proactive about unsubscribing… soon it will pay off with far less spam coming into your inbox. Just know it gets better with every unsubscribe!

I hope you found these three strategies useful in taming your inbox. It takes time to get your email environment setup properly, but trust me, it’s totally worth the small investment of implementing best practices now to save many more wasted cycles going forward.

Keep in mind that everyone’s inbox needs are different. There’s unfortunately no one-size fits all solution, so personalize these techniques as you need to.

If you have any suggestions or additional tips for managing email please comment on those below or reach out to me – I would love to hear them.

01:15

One trick you may or may not have picked up about Gmail is that you can add in periods anywhere in the front part of your address and it makes no difference whatsoever: john.smith@gmail.com works just the same as johnsmith@gmail.com.

What’s more, you can add a plus sign and any word before the @ sign (e.g. johnsmith+hello@gmail.com) and messages will still reach you. If these tweaks make no difference, then why use them? One major reason: filters.

Here are a few ways you can make use of the feature to bring order to the chaos of your inbox.

Signing up for newsletters

The next time you sign up for a newsletter, app or website, use an address like johnsmith+news@gmail.com.That way, you can filter out everything sent to this address to a low-priority label or folder. A couple of options available to you are to have Gmail mark all these messages as unimportant, or categorize them all as Updates.

If you want to get really involved with your email management then you could even add a specific word for everything you sign up for: johnsmith+evernote@gmail.com for example. This might eventually become more trouble than it’s worth, but it does give you the power to instantly send emails from a certain source to the spam folder, or to trash them immediately.

Giving friends VIP status

As well as marking some messages as unimportant, you can of course do the opposite. Try handing out an alternative email address — such as john.smith@gmail.com — to your nearest and dearest to help them stand out from the dross that usually fills up your inbox. Then set up a filter to mark these messages as important and top priority.

There’s the mobile aspect to consider too. Through the settings in the Gmail app for Android it’s possible to set notifications on a label-by-label basis, so if you set up a new label for your VIP contacts then you can make sure only these specific messages trigger an alert on your phone.

Dividing work life and personal life

You may already have a separate Google account for your job, but if you’re someone who combines work and pleasure into one central inbox then use the address tricks to distinguish between the two. It could be as simple as adding “+w” to your Gmail address for any work-related emails.

That then gives you the ability to mark every incoming work email with an appropriate label, with no manual effort required — not only will your inbox look tidier, but it will make searches much more efficient. You can restrict queries to one particular label and leave yourself with fewer results to sift through.

Controlling your home

We don’t like to go more than a few days on Field Guide without mentioning something you can do withIFTTT, so here you go. Set up a johnsmith+lights@gmail.com address as a “Send mail as” alias in the Gmail settings and you can set up an IFTTT trigger that activates whenever an email appears from this address.

Select this alias when composing a message from the office or your mobile phone and you utilise any of IFTTT’s features. You’ll essentially be sending emails to yourself, but you could switch Hue lights on or off, turn up your Nest thermostat, and so on. You could also use the trick to send photos to Flickr, update Twitter, send a text from your Android phone, and so on and so on.

Creating a to do list

If you set up a filter that labels every email coming in to johnsmith+todo@gmail.com then you can pull up this label as a makeshift to do list. As well as emailing tasks when you’re sat in the office or on your phone, you can forward emails from other accounts or even send photos to the list from wherever you happen to be.

Anything that can be emailed can be added to your to do list, and as usual there’s the option within the filter to automatically archive these messages and mark them as read so they don’t clutter up your inbox.

Those are our ideas for using your Gmail aliases, but if you have some tricks and tips of your own we’d love to hear about them.

[Header image: Alexander Ryabintsev / Shutterstock.com]

01:06

Gmail's best features are tucked away in its nooks and crannies, meaning there are endless tricks you might not know about. Ahead, check out 20 essential pointers, and then add your own in the comments.

01:00

In his book Tweet Naked, online marketing expert and Social Media Firm CEO Scott Levy provides the critical information entrepreneurs need to craft a social media strategy that will boost their brand and their business. In this edited excerpt, the author takes your Twitter skills to the next level by describing nine things you should be doing to up your Twitter game.

Do you want to be a rookie or a pro bowl veteran? The way you go about "tackling" your career is similar to being a rookie or a veteran. You can go through the day-to-day and remain average, or you can study, practice, train and try to find every possible advantage you can over your opponents.

For me, the following are simply things you must do to take part in everyday social media. To others, these might feel like advanced techniques and tactics that are at a higher knowledge level and maybe even desire level when it comes to doing social media. But if you want to elevate your game and get the most out of your investment (time and money) in social media, then take it to the next level with these nine tips and tricks.

1. Follow the leads.

Twitter isn't just about your tweets; it's also a great source for information on your competition. Monitor their engagement, find out what the hot topics are. This will give you fresh insight on how to broaden your own following and what those people are looking for. It may even show you what your competition is doing better than you. With a little tweet tweaking, you may be able to get those followers to convert to your own company.

2. Save the sales pitch.

Don't get caught up in using Twitter as a selling tool. Instead, use it to increase customer loyalty and offer valuable information to your followers. Overmarketing will merely leave a sour taste in followers' mouths, and you may even end up losing them if their feed gets too clogged with too many promotions. Be viewed as a resource, not a door to door salesperson.

3. Keep it short.

Posting links and content is a great thing, but Twitter users are all about brevity, so be sure to shorten your links by using a redirect service. http://bit.ly is a good one for measuring your click-thrus and performance, but if you don’t use something like that, Twitter will automatically shorten your links using their built in T.CO shortner.

4. Reply with a period.

Twitter filters allow users to only view replies if they are following each side of the conversation. But by starting off your reply with a period, the post won't start with @--it will instead be viewed as a separate tweet and will be seen by all of your followers. Breaking grammar rules never felt so good.

5. Lose a few characters.

Yes, 140 characters is the technical limit on Twitter, but all the cool kids are now only tweeting with 125 or less. Short, punchy tweets will grab your followers' attention rather than getting lost in their feeds. The more characters left, the easier it is for people to retweet and add their own comment as well.

6. Ask Questions.

People want to feel like you value their opinion and asking questions, even simple ones, tend to receive more engagement.

7. Be a resource.

Providing value and being seen as a resource is a sure way to build a quality follow and to get retweeted. In a sea of nonsense and worthless tweets, if you’re the one sharing quality, interesting content; you’ll stand out. If you spend all of your time sharing what you ate or just having personal convos, you very well could lose followers.

8. A picture's worth a thousand tweets.

I can't stress enough how important pictures are in any social media platform, and Twitter is no exception. Twitter now displays images in timelines, and if you’re not taking advantage of this you’re missing out. An image attached to any tweet is sure to increase visibility and engagement.

9. Don’t be too good for people.

No matter how well known you are, or how busy you are don’t be that person who thinks they are too good to reply to anyone. I’m typically slammed, but I still take time every day to answer each and every person (that I see) who tweets me, thanks me, says they are reading my book etc. I believe in building your fans and brand champions one engagement at a time. It’s amazing how one quick conversation or reply can make someone feel appreciated and turn them into a brand champion or personal fan.

Publisher's Note: This book excerpt has been revised since its original printing and publication on this website.

Courtesy:http://www.entrepreneur.com/