- This is the second video in our series
about your Google account.
Now, in our first video,
we talked about setting up a Google account.
Today, it's all about Gmail.
The basics of using Gmail, today on Dotto Tech.
(lively music)
Steve Dotto here.
How the heck you doing this fine day?
At Dotto Tech, we make technology easy so you can do more.
Now, today on the show,
we are going to be talking about Gmail
from quite a basic level.
So if you're already an experienced Gmail user,
you might find something new in what I am about to teach
but chances are you know most of this stuff already.
Now, in the last video in this series,
we set up a Google account from scratch
and now in the second part,
we are going to set up our Gmail account
within that Google account
and the whole goal of this series is for people
to understand how the Google ecosystem works,
how one application works with another application
to add more value to the whole.
So now, we're looking at Gmail.
Now, I set up a brand new account in the last episode
and this was the screen that was left to me
when I started to set up Gmail.
I came into this and it said,
you're 10% through on your setup, Steve.
Now, you've got to learn how to use Gmail,
set it up for mobile, choose a theme,
import contacts and mail,
and then change your profile image
in order to be 100% set up for Gmail.
Well, we're not gonna go through
all of these steps with you today.
You can obviously, I recommend you go through them all
so that you learn the skills.
I am gonna take a look at them as we go
but then I'm gonna dive in
and make sure that I talk to you about
what I think are the most important points within Gmail.
So let's just quickly buzz through this
and I might fast-forward parts of this
but let's see what they do as far as learning to use Gmail.
They walked me through with this informational screen here
that talks me through all of the basic things.
Okay, I know how to use Gmail.
I'm ready to go to the next thing.
Setting up for mobile,
get the official Gmail mobile app.
Oh, this is interesting.
Choose any of the following options
to get the right Gmail app for your device.
So here it is.
You enter your phone number here
and they will send you a link to your smartphone
or you can scan the QR code
or you can visit this on your mobile device.
Now, that won't work if you're on iPhone.
One of these first two will work on an iPhone,
this other one will probably only work
if you're on an Android phone
but this will allow you to set up
on your smartphone Gmail which will be the same account.
One of the beauties of a Gmail account
is it's a cloud-based service,
meaning that all of our all of our transactions
are done in the cloud,
meaning that the clients or the tools
that we use on our computer and on our iPhone
are all working off of the same file effectively
or off of the same account.
So in Gmail, it means that on the computer,
we can use a web browser to access all of our Gmail
and on our smartphone, we can use the Gmail app
which will look identical to the app looks,
to how the account looks in our browser.
All of our structure is the same,
all of our tools are the same,
and you set that up by either scanning in the QR code
or texting the number to yourself
and then launching the setup
and then logging in with the same account,
then everything is mirrored between the two.
That's one of the real beauties of using Gmail.
So I'm gonna take a pass on that right now
but you can walk through that
and do that very easily yourself.
And look, we're already 50% through on our set up.
Next is choosing a theme.
They'll give us different graphic looks
to Gmail on our computer and I don't like any of these.
I like to leave it at the absolute basic
so I'm gonna leave it the way it is
and that's another 15% done, thumbs up.
Next, if you have contacts that are in Outlook
or in Yahoo Mail or in some other account,
you can import them all using this next tool.
This will be a wizard that will walk us through the process
of importing all of your different email addresses
and the different phone numbers that you have
from your different address books that you have.
Now, because there are so many different variables,
again, I'm not gonna do that with you right now
but you get the idea on how to do that
and that's a process that you can work through yourself.
Some people never do that, by the way.
Some people just start and as they add new email addresses,
they build their address book from scratch.
It's really your choice.
And the final thing to do is to change your profile image.
So this is the little image
that's gonna appear in your account,
in your header, on your different screens.
And so, just basically upload a thumbnail image of you
and I'll just grab one of my photos here.
What photos are there of me?
My photos.
Okay, and what am I gonna do?
I'll upload a photo.
I've got a photo on my computer of me.
This is so exciting.
I know that you're loving this.
Mm-hmm.
(mysterious music)
So there, there's the thumbnail photo.
And I'm opening it
and there's a nice thumbnail photo of me
like I'm very happy, very dapper.
That was at my nephew's wedding and that picture,
select that as my profile picture
and now, I've got a profile picture
that identifies me as me.
That's nice.
All right, I'm all set.
Now, I'm ready to send and receive email.
Okay, let me show you the main areas of Gmail
now that we're into it and we've got it set up.
Down the left-hand side,
here's where we organize all of our email.
We've got an inbox that all of our email messages come into
and then we can sort those emails into different categories
mainly within this section here.
So this will change over time
as you add some more functionality to Gmail.
Along the top are the different Gmail tabs that we have
and if I open up the settings,
we can configure the inbox
and that allows me to select which tabs are available.
Now, this is something unique to Gmail, at least set up on,
I don't know, maybe four years ago,
and it helps you organize your Gmail,
your incoming email into stuff which is personal email
that your primary email,
it's stuff that's social networking-related
like notifications from Facebook or Twitter
and promotions and others.
So this is Google using its powerful
search and analytics tools to look at email coming in
and try and filter out the junk email
and the stuff that's not as relevant
and make sure that the email which is most relevant to you
ends up in your primary inbox.
Now, if you receive a lot of email,
this becomes quite a blessing
and it's something that a lot of people use.
Some people don't appreciate it
being pre-sorted for them and filtered,
other people appreciate it but it's your choice
as to whether or not you're gonna use it.
So here in these tabs,
you can turn on and off which tabs are available to you
by turning on and off these check boxes.
And as a reminder, I'm just gonna cancel this.
We get to this under the settings.
See here you go under settings in Configure Inbox
and they tell you what's in each one.
In the primary, that's the conversations
that they believe are most important.
That's person-to-person conversations,
emails where you have the direct person's email address
in your contact list
and you appear to be engaged in an active conversation.
Social are anything that's coming from YouTube
or from dating sites or from Twitter or from Facebook.
If you've got notifications turned on in a social site
and there's communications coming,
it will end up in the social tab.
In the Promotions is when it sees things
that where maybe you've signed up for a newsletter
for a shopping mall or for a store
or for special offers and coupons,
that's where the different offers are gonna come through.
Updates are coming from pieces of software
that you've signed up for that are telling you
there's a security update or things like that
or where there's notifications
or they appear to be notification-related
as opposed to sale-related.
So it's more informational than promotions.
And then Forums are if you're in conversation groups,
if you're in discussion groups,
if you belong to meetup groups or something like that,
those notifications will appear.
Now, everyone that you have checked off here
will then appear here as a tab as you go along
and as you go through, you can turn on and off these tabs
if you find that you're not using them,
and if you find that a lot of email
is appearing in one of the tabs
that you think should be in another tab,
all you do is you go along
is you click on that piece of email
and you drag it from one tab to the next
and then Google will learn over time
that that sort of email,
you consider to be classified that way.
So this is Google acting
as almost like as an administrative assistant
filtering your email as you go
and these tabs are a big part
of the way that Google Mail works or Gmail works.
Now, looking at the rest of the screen, of course,
when you're in your inbox and you're in your primary tab,
all of your email appears here.
We're kind of going through the rest of the setup here
of the different administrative area.
On the top right, these little nine dots
that I talked about in the last video as well,
this gives you access to the rest of the Google Apps.
So if you wanna go into your calendar,
if you wanna go into Drive,
if you wanna check your Google Contacts
and add new people to your address book,
all of those up here here under the nine dots.
The most important tool in Gmail are the settings.
Here when you go into under the gear menu
and you go into the settings themselves,
this is where you set up
all of the different attributes to Gmail
and as you become more sophisticated using Gmail,
you will go through this area here often
to set things up the way you want, to customize it.
Now, if you follow our videos on YouTube,
we often go into this area
to do everything from setting up email filters
to setting up the different folders
that we have over here on the left-hand side
so that we can sort our email,
you could add multiple email accounts to this.
It'll determine how your email looks as you read your email
and if you have additional functionality
for doing things like adding canned texts
or automatic replies to your email,
down below here you'll set up your vacation autoresponder
if you happen to be away on holiday
and you want an email automatically going
to people who send an email to you
while you're away on a cruise somewhere,
if you wanna set up a signature,
all of that appears here in these settings.
This will be an area
that you will get intimately familiar with over time.
But all of that is pretty far down the road.
Let me show you the most basic things
that you're gonna do in Gmail
and that is you're going to send an email.
Maybe you're gonna send one to me, info@DottoTech.com.
So I'm gonna put in my email address.
So you can just type in email addresses.
There you go.
You add a subject
and then you can add your copy.
Now, the nice thing about, well, not the nice thing.
A nice thing about Gmail is they've added a lot
of different formatting options to us here
where you can incorporate attachments, you can insert links,
you can insert graphics, you can even insert little videos
if your computer is set up to record video
and you can embed that right within the email that you sent.
But you sent your email to me
and you go through all of the different content,
interesting stuff, and when you're ready to send,
you click here Send.
Now, I'm gonna show you one tip.
That's one of the biggest lifesavers
that you can have in Gmail.
So before I send this, I'm gonna go back into settings
just to give you an idea,
just to give you an idea of the sophistication
and what we have available to us here in Gmail.
And down here, let me find it here.
It's gonna be Undo Send.
See this right here?
I'm gonna set this cancellation period to be 10 seconds
'cause what happens is as soon as I send this,
sometimes you decide oh, I don't wanna send it.
Oh, I need to edit something.
Watch what happens.
So I've got that set up, I'm gonna go back into my inbox.
Oops!
Now, when you change, make any changes,
I have to remember you have to go down the bottom
and save the changes.
There we go.
Once that's done, we're back in the inbox
and oh, just a minute, Steve!
Where did that email go you were working on?
See, that often happens.
You jump out and you jump back into it
and you've lost the email.
That's okay.
See, right here we've got drafts.
The email is still in drafts.
There it is.
I'm gonna open it up and so it's still stored in drafts.
It will retain that for you.
You don't lose it by jumping out.
Just go look in Drafts and you'll find it,
and you can send it from here directly.
We don't have to move it.
We can send it directly from here.
But watch what happens when I click Send.
Here, I can undo it if I decide, uh-oh, the message is sent,
and I've got 10 seconds to call it back
if I have senders remorse,
if i remember that I forgot to add an attachment
or I see a typo just as the screen is closing,
all of that you can recall it based on the settings
that I set up in the settings of what the Undo Send is.
Even though that's not a,
maybe something that you're gonna use very often,
it gives you an idea of the kind of control that you have
and how you should be diving into
and learning how to use Gmail as you go along.
Now, there are so many other aspects that Gmail has
but now you know that you can set up the account,
you can go through their own tutorial,
and you have a basic understanding
of the structure of Gmail.
In fact, we have folders down the side
where information's gonna be stored,
you have the main center section with the tabs,
and all of the different
and the tabs that will filter email for you automatically,
you know where to go into settings to make changes
so that your email works the way you want
and you know how to get to the other Google aspects
through the Google Apps menu.
That's the basis of Gmail.
Now, there's so much more that you'll learn over time
but that's why you're subscribed to this channel, isn't it?
In our next video in this series,
we're gonna be talking about Google Calendar.
Oh, such a fantastic organizational tool.
Google Calendar coming up
so make sure that you subscribe to this channel
or you can check out our other videos here on the side.
Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming a castle!