Gmail is in style for a purpose—it comes full of fairly just a few options. But a few of its defaults may be annoying or restricted.

Fortunately, you possibly can repair that. Dive into the settings and also you’ll discover a stunning variety of tweaks you may make to the interface. If you haven’t already spent a while in there, I extremely suggest it. You could discover just a few options you didn’t find out about earlier than.

Not positive the place to start out? You can take a cue from my favorites. Among the listing are 5 settings I completely have to alter so as to discover Gmail usable, they usually’re fairly common. Try them out, and if you happen to don’t find yourself liking them, you may make totally different changes on your account.

• Maximum web page dimension: I can’t stand seeing solely a handful of messages at one time, and to me, something below 50 messages is a handful. I bump that quantity straight as much as 100.
• Undo ship: Sometimes I’m too fast to hit “Send” on an e mail (or Alt + Enter). Enabling this function lets me snatch again the e-mail earlier than it’s actually despatched to repair a typo or rephrase a sentence I’m having second ideas about. I set my window of alternative to the max of 30 seconds, however you possibly can go shorter.
• Keyboard shortcuts: I’m quick with a mouse, however even quicker when jamming on my keyboard. With solely a handful of those enabled, they make my life a lot simpler. And if I ever overlook a command, typing ? whereas in Gmail brings up a helpful cheat sheet. Plus, you may also activate customized keyboard shortcuts to essentially supercharge these.
• Unread message icon: For some folks, seeing what number of unread messages they’ve isn’t helpful (and would possibly give the heebie-jeebies). But I depart solely messages requiring observe up in my Inbox, so seeing that icon quantity change is refined and efficient solution to know once I ought to bounce again into my Gmail tab.
• Stars: You can star e mail to extra simply observe up on the messages—however that one yellow star is a default that’s simply modified to incorporate extra coloration choices. I detailed the step-by-step of turning these on in a separate tip, exactly as a result of going from one coloration to the total set of 12 was productiveness sport changer for me.

PCWorld

I really like these as a starter set, however there are different settings I like to show off, largely as a result of they annoy me as a author and editor—the grammar solutions, sensible compose, and sensible reply. The first two irritate me (for now, Google doesn’t know the English language higher than I do) and the latter at all times makes me really feel like I’m going to press the mistaken button and never solely ship a stiff, canned robo-response—however to somebody I completely didn’t need to ship one to.

Once you’ve tried these on for dimension, you are able to do different issues in Gmail to make it work higher for you. Perhaps it’s time to purge unneeded email (which could make the unread message icon a extra helpful function). Or if you happen to want, you possibly can download a copy your email. And after all, if somebody simply gained’t stop sending you undesirable e mail, you possibly can block them.