Moving Towards a Better Use of Gmail [part3]

By now, you guys should have mastered some keyboard shortcuts. Some of you probably created a few filters and labels(I doubt it). Today I was setting up a few things for my upcoming trip to Boston(Celtics and Patriots pride baby!!!) and I remembered a very important gmail feature that most of you probably don't know about: the Vacation Responder.

When you are going on vacation and will not be accessing your email, you don't need a secretary to reply to them, you need vacation responder.

To create a vacation responder, click on “Settings” at the very top of the page on the right-hand side. Scroll down until you see the section entitled “Vacation responder”. Click on “Vacation responder on”. Next, type a custom message in the boxes provided to let others know that you are away on vacation. In your message, you may want to include when you will be back so they can get a better idea of when they can expect a response from you. Then click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page.

Now you can go away and not have to worry about that Employer trying to reach you for a position, or that client that needs your help ASAP.

I also wanted to talk about the search bar today. I was helping a lady out the other day with an attachment she was trying to send out. She was looking for an old email but instead of searching for it through gmail's search form, she was going page by page looking for something sent to her last year!

I stopped her and asked:

"You know that you can search for an email by typing some of it's credentials in the search form right?"

She looked at me like I was speaking Portuguese and said no.
Im guessing that most of you are in the same boat so I am going over a few examples:

1. Let's say you get messages from john on a regular but your looking for a specific message that has a recipe in it. Goto the search bar and enter: "from: john has: recipe"
2. You need an email that you recieved between february and march 2007. Goto the search bar enter: "after:2007/02/01 before:2007/03/01"
3. You can get an email by just typing one of the words that were in the email. You're looking for the message you got that contains your insurance information. Just type "insurance" in the search bar and you will get a list of messages that match the criteria.
4. You can even pulll up all the emails from a specific email address. Just type "from: jojo55447@gmail.com" and you will get all the emails you've ever recieved from him.
   

Hopefully you understand now how easy it is to use the search bar. Give it try, leave me a message if you have a question. If your query has no results just add more criteria or approach it from another angle. See you guys next time.