Steve Dotto here.
How are you this fine day?
Me?
I'm thrilled because I get to do a demo today based on an email request from a subscriber
and nothing makes me happier than responding to an email request from a subscriber.
Okay, I'm lying.
There are plenty of things that actually make me happier than that but I am happy to be
able to respond to an email request from a subscriber.
So today, based on a request from Kelso, we are going to be talking about setting up your
preferences in Gmail to suit your own personality and your work style.
You're going to want to stick around.
Alrighty then.
I got to receive an email from Kelso B. who says, "I watch your video, your YouTube video
and I'm a subscriber.
Obviously I use Gmail.
Is there a way to change the default settings?
The font size options are small, normal, large and huge."
The default was set at normal but he likes to use large which is a great idea.
I like larger fonts, too, and I like to set it up for larger fonts too.
He's asking if there's a way to change the default and indeed there is.
Ironically, this used to be something that you had to do in Labs and now you have it
built right into Gmail.
So I got to thinking I'm going to do a demo today on how to first of all set your fonts,
but also some of the other preset things that you can do to make Gmail to work a little
bit better for you because often we don't dive into the settings and take a look.
So let's do that together right now.
All we do is you go in Gmail, a new web browser, under the gear icon here and you go into Settings.
This is the engine room that drives your Gmail account once you go into Settings.
Along the top, we have all of our different options but what we're going to look at today
is all really right here within the General Settings tab and there right near the top
we've got the ability to be able to choose what font and how we send our email.
You may notice that I don't have the standard.
If you just open your Gmail, you'll be set to San Serif and the font size will be set
to normal.
That's going to be the settings and that's the size of the email and what the body text
will look like as you're writing.
For me, I find that text to be a little bit small to comfortably read so I went it and
because I like to establish my own personality rather than just using the San Serif, I chose
Trebuchet because I like the word Trebuchet.
You can also use Comic Sans, if you choose.
If you choose to choose Comic Sans, please do not send me an email.
I'm sorry.
I'm kind of biased against Comic Sans.
I don't like it, never have like it.
I don't know why it's there.
But by all means, please use trebuchet and here's where we go to change the size.
Now we don't need huge but large is going to work quite well.
You can also change the color if you choose to.
Now one of the things you have to remember when you change any of the settings in Gmail,
even when you're on a web browser and you think you can change them, it should work--
it doesn't.
You have to go down to the bottom and you have to click on Save Changes in order to
save any of your changes.
So now when I go and compose a new email, in my body copy I've got Trebuchet which is
a slightly larger font.
It's a little bit easier for me to read.
I like how that looks and as I said, that's how I choose.
So I not only make it more practical as far as I'm concerned.
It also just makes my email look little bit different, which kind of stamps my own personality
on it.
Now let me show you the next thing that I wanted to show you.
It's how Nested Email works.
They call it conversation view here and it's right beneath the Text Style one.
This is the conversation view.
How email gets displayed on your screen really is a personal choice.
Some people like to have all of the email that's in a thread contained within each and
every email that they look at.
Other people like to have each individual piece of email separate.
Personally, I like to have each individual piece of email separate.
So when you go into my inbox, this is what my inbox looks like.
You cannot see any nested emails.
There are no numbers next to the emails telling you how many emails are in that thread.
Each one is dealt with individually.
Now there are ways that I can go and I can see the other email from the individual because
I installed some other software.
Here Bruce and I have been having a conversation back and forth and if I go in here, I've got
a tool called Reportive installed, which allow me to click here and go Recent Mail and I
can see all of the recent email including all of that that's within this thread form
Bruce.
So that's a way that I deal with being able to see the email threads.
A lot of people though choose to use the Nested view.
As I say, it's not my particular preference but let me show you what happens when we go
in and we use a Nested view or sorry, Conversation view they call it.
So I'm going to now save these changes and when I do that, as soon as we go back into
my inbox you'll see an immediate difference in my inbox.
There's a number beside all of the different emails telling me how many emails are in that
thread.
If I click on any one of them, nested within this email are all of those replies back and
forth and they limit it to 100.
Once you hit 100 replies within a nested email or conversation view, they start a new email
for you.
I find this too noisy for me.
It gets too busy for me so I don't like it but it's a personal choice.
You can choose to use it if you want.
There's no judgement whatsoever if it works better for you, choose it.
Now while I was showing this, I thought I really have to show them this other feature
that I use.
I've shown this to you before in my demos but it's worth showing you again because it's
so darn useful.
Let me go back into my inbox.
Let's go back to this email where I'm replying to Kelso who started this whole thing with
a request.
Let's say as I'm writing away and I do that thing that we often do, the premature send,
and I'm going to click on send here.
You know how sometimes you send an email before you've attached the attachment that you're
supposed so you have to send another email, the mea culpa email—oops, I sent too quickly—or
you see a typo and then you still hit premature send?
If I click send right now, take a look near the top of my screen.
See how I can undo it?
So for about 10 or 15 seconds after I've sent an email, I can actually undo the sending
of that email, call it back, so it kind of buffers it before it sends.
That to me has saved my bacon so many times when I've accidentally seen a typo just as
the email closes or forgotten that attachment just as it closes.
Now you do have to know that this is not a setting that you can find right within the
General Settings.
You actually have to go into the Gmail Lab.
So going back into the Settings, we go to Labs here and in the Labs, you will find right
near the top, Undo Send.
You have to enable Undo Send in order to do that.
It tells you right there that it just gives you an opportunity to just basically recall
it for just a few seconds after it's been sent, to allow you to recall it.
Once it's been sent like ten hours later, you can't do it.
It has to be an instantaneous thing where you have sender's remorse.
At that instant, you can recall it.
Now while we are on sending email, my final tip of the day and this one here is really
useful as far as speeding up your process, I choose right underneath all of the different
things that we've shown, the conversation view, is Send & Archive.
It allows me to turn my Send button into a Send & Archive by saying, Show Send & Archive.
So let me show you what happens with that.
If we go back into that same email that we were just talking about, what happens is when
I send it, it will automatically archive the email as opposed to just sending it and then
leaving the original email in your inbox.
This speeds up the cleaning of your inbox.
So think about it.
Normally what happens is you'll reply to an email, send it—hopefully you don't have
to undo the send and it's clean and you can send it—you can send it and as soon as you
send it, I would normally just hit the open bracket which would archive the email because
I don't want it in my inbox.
I want it archived somewhere.
With this button here, it goes not just Send now.
It's got Send and it's got the little Archive icon telling me that it will actually archive
the email.
So it automatically pulls it out of my inbox so I don't see it there next time I open my
inbox.
If I still want to see it in my inbox, I can just click on the Send button and it will
stay on my inbox.
Send & Archive is one less step that I have to do in order to keep my inbox clean.
I hope you found these tips today to be useful and I've got to thank Kelso.
Thank you so much for the request.
I appreciate you reaching out and making the request.
If you have found this useful and you want to be a part of our community, there are three
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I can assure you.
And with that, I am done.
Thanks again, Kelso.
I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!