Outlook is no longer the world's most commonly used mail
client -- that honor now goes to Gmail, which is broadly used by both consumers
and businesses alike. For a program with such deep market share, you'd think
Gmail would be pretty polished. You'd be wrong. Anyone who has ever
transitioned from Outlook can tell you that Gmail is a relatively inelegant
service lacking apparent table stakes. Thankfully, you can fix that.
Specifically, you can unlock a number of "stealth"
features using something called Gmail Labs. Gmail Labs is really just a sort of
beta feature control panel; to get to it, click Settings in the gear icon (on
the top right of the screen, under your profile icon) and then click the Labs
tab. Here you'll find close to two dozen options, but they are not all created
equal. A few are particularly noteworthy.
Auto Advance is one of the features you'll wonder why you
have to go out of your way to enable. Ordinarily, Gmail doesn't advance to the
next conversation when you delete or archive a thread. With Canned Responses,
you can teach Gmail to go forward or back to the next or previous conversation.
Canned Responses lets you create email templates for quick
replies. If you have a few boilerplate responses that you frequently send, use
this tool to create snippets of text (or even more lengthy replies) that you
can pick from a list and insert into email messages. Canned Responses lets you
create snippets, edit, delete, and insert them into emails as needed.
Keyboard Shortcuts allow you to specify hotkeys to perform a
wide variety of operations -- from opening a new blank email message to switching
views to marking email as spam. Indeed, keyboard shortcuts are a significant
source of pain for Outlook users switching to Gmail, so this can make things
feel a little better. You still won't be able to press the Delete key to delete
email messages, but you can tell Gmail what other key you'd like to use for
that task.
Preview Pane takes the relatively primitive default view
offered by Gmail and makes it look more like Outlook and most other email
clients. Turn this on to see a preview pane that shows the contents of the
selected message. You can set the preview to horizontal or vertical.
Undo Send is perhaps the most useful Labs feature. It does
exactly what it sounds like; emails are delayed for a short time, giving you
the chance to recall an email sent in error. Undo Send isn't like the Recall
feature in Outlook -- it can't retrieve an email that has actually left your
inbox. By default, you get 10 seconds to change your mind (adjustable up to 30
seconds via the General tab). That's often enough, though, to recover from a
horrifying mistake, like realizing the wrong people are on the cc: line the
moment after clicking Send.
Source From:- http://www.cbsnews.com/
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