Gmail communication

Now that we've configured Gmail, let's go ahead and explore Gmail as an Application. Here I've logged into Gmail by logging into Google with my Google Apps for Education account UserName. And then I clicked on Mail. If you have custom URLs set up, you can also access this by going to your custom URL. For us we set up mail.orangevalleyschools.com. Once inside of Gmail, your Homepage is always going to be your Inbox. Here I can see a variety of messages that are coming to me. These are all just sample messages that I've had Gmail create and send to me, so that we can use them as an example in this particular course.

I can tell that an email is unread because it's bolded. If I click on a certain email, and I read this email And then go back to my Inbox, I can see that its now darker in color in the background, and the font is no longer bolded. As I'm going through my email Inbox, I also have the ability to star and mark certain messages important. This is kind of like organizing them into different folders. However, you can do with a single mouse click and its built into everyone's system. For example, let's say that it was a long weekend and I'm here on Monday morning trying to figure out what emails are important for me to take a look at. I can simply go through and find the emails that I think need a little bit of follow up and I can click Stars.

In addition to that, if I think an email is important and might need to be saved as an important email, I can flag those as important. By clicking either the Star or the Important Flag, it's going to automatically add these to the Star or the Important box. You'll notice that these emails were not moved. They are still inside of my Inbox, and I can even make them starred or important without having read the email. To access these I can now click on the left hand side where it says Starred and you'll notice the three emails that I just added stars to were automatically moved to the starred box. I can also click on the Important box on the left hand side and the emails where I clicked the Important flag have been automatically added here as well.

At any time I can always access the Inbox simply by clicking back on the Inbox on the left hand side. You can also see that the 14 tells me that I have 14 unread messages inside my Inbox. There's also a variety of things you can do to mass clean up your Inbox. For example, all of these Google Calendar reminders have happened in the past. So, I don't really need to look at them as I'm cleaning out my Inbox. So, what I can do is I can go through and quickly check off each particular email that says Google Calendar next to it. So now that I've checked each email that has Google Calendar. I can go ahead and makes changes to all of these emails at once.

I can also use the Drop Down box to select, All emails, No emails, I can only select emails that have been read, Unread, I can only select Starred emails or Unstarred emails. With the ones that I've selected, I now have some Options at the very top. I can Archive them, I can mark them as Spam, or I can Delete them. I can also move them to a New Folder, or I can add Labels to them so I can find them more easily. There's also the More button, where if I click the More button, it gives me a variety of ways that I can manipulate these email messages for example, maybe I just want to mark them all as Read. If I click Marked as Read I can now see that every email that I had marked no longer has bold text, and if I uncheck them I can see that they're not a grey color behind.

Inside of Gmail you also have the ability to create custom folders to help you organize your emails. To do this, select the emails that you'd like to move, come up to the Folder Icon. At the very bottom we're going to go ahead and say Create New. And I'm going to call these Google Calendar. Now if you'd like to make this particular folder underneath a different distinction, you can go ahead and select to nest it. Now because we have nothing created, there's nothing to nest it under. So I'm going to go ahead and Uncheck that to make sure that it's a top of a folder, and I'm going to click Create. So all the emails that I had selected have now been moved to my Google Calendar Folder on the left hand side.

If I click on that Folder I can see that all those emails are now showing up. In addition to that, I can also see that because I've read some of these emails, or marked them as Read, that the number of Unread emails has dropped down to seven. Now, in addition in being able to manage as well as organize the emails that come into our Inbox, we also want to be able to Compose emails. The large Compose button on the left hand side, when you click it will automatically open up a dialog box that gives us the ability to Create and Send an email. If you're sending an email to someone inside of your Google Apps for Education account, for example another staff member, all you have to is start typing their Name.

And Google will automatically help hint for us the people we're going to send that to. As I started to type Jeff's name, Jeff automatically appeared. All I have to do is hit the Tab key And he'll be automatically added to this email. I can now add a Subject, I can add a Message, and I click Send. In addition to sending this email, we'll have the ability to change some of the Fonts, such as whether or not it's Bolded, Underlined, adding Bullets, as well as changing the Color of the Font. I can Attach files to this email, and I can even come over here and choose to discard this Draft. If I decide that I'm not going to send this email and I don't want to to save it. You'll notice in the left hand side, that the draft area is automatically showing me that I have some new emails there.

If I go ahead and click on Drafts on the left hand side, I can see that this draft email that I just created to Jeff is being saved for me automatically. That way, in case you're halfway through typing an email message to someone and your computer dies or you have to go do something else, Google's going to automatically save the draft for you. You can come back to your Draft Folder. Reopen that email, continue typing and when you're ready, go ahead and hit the Send button. So there we've quickly taken a look at both how to read and organize email messages inside a Gmail as well as how to compose new messages. I do recommend you take the time to click around Gmail and become familiar with the Interface as there's a lot of options that we have not covered.