The Hidden Guide

Become A Gmail Ninja Now

Posted on July 1, 2009 by admin10 Comments

Google really made the best of Gmail, its by far the best online email management system out there right now, But a lot of people still use it like a regular email service, lots of people don’t even know about it’s power-features So Google launched a new Tips area of the site today to serve as a reference point for how to become what it calls a “Gmail Ninja.”

Basically there are four area for the tips  “White belt,” “Green belt,” “Black belt,” and “Gmail master,” based on your level of expertise. While the White and Green belt stuff is mostly for neophytes, there are some good tips in there that you may have forgotten along the way while using Gmail. The later belts are the ones that contain some of the good stuff though, particularly some of the big keyboard and search shortcuts, that I always forget to use.

Google has also made a PDF version of the list for you to print out and “pin to your wall,” which would very useful, like cheat sheet.

White Belt

1. Use stars to indicate a note is special.
2. Reply by chat.
3. Organize your email with labels.
4. Clean up your inbox using “Move to” — it works just like folders.
5. Search your mail instead of sorting.
6. Archive messages to tidy up your inbox without deleting anything.
7. Import your email and contacts from your old address.
8. Spice up your inbox with a theme.
9. Join forces to rid the world of spam.

Green Belt

1. Talk face-to-face with video chat.
2. Use Tasks as a handy to-do list.
3. Use filters to control the flow of incoming mail.
4. Highlight important emails using filters and colored labels.
5. Send email from your phone.
6. Preview attachments without downloading them.
7. Avoid email gaffes with Undo Send.
8. Tell your friends what you’re up to with a status message.
9. Never forget an attachment again.
10. Tell everyone when you’ll be back with vacation responder.
11. Nothing says “I’m excited” like a bouncing happy face emoticon.

Black Belt

1. Get through your mail faster with keyboard shortcuts.
2. Use search operators to find the exact message you’re looking for.
3. Filter your email with personalized email addresses.
4. See which messages were sent right to you.
5. Make Gmail go where the internet doesn’t.
6. Quickly add multiple attachments to an email.
7. Add “(EOM)” to the subject of one-liner messages.
8. Set up canned responses instead of typing the same reply over and over again.
9. Click less and watch more using YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp previews.
10. Use quick links to get anywhere in Gmail with one click.
11. Send and archive in one step.

Gmail Master

1. Bring Google Calendar and Docs to Gmail.
2. Send SMS text messages right from Gmail.
3. Forget to sign out of a public computer? Sign out remotely.
4. Personalize your RSS feeds in web clips.
5. Access your mail via https.
6. Search for superstars by name.
7. Use Gmail on your own domain.

List of Top 5 advanced Google search tricks

Posted on June 7, 2009 by MidaComments Off

We have posted before List Of Best Google Search Tricks , its amazing to know that google is not just a search engine you can use it as convertor tool to convert between currency, weather, time, weight .

So here we are again with the top 5 advanced google search tricks that you must know.

1.Exact phrase searches

Use double quotes for exact phrase searches.  Usually, Google is smart enough to determine the matching websites that contain your queries but there are cases that it returns “relevant” pages at the top that don’t exactly match your search string.

To limit Google to return only pages that has the exact string as your query, enclose your query with double quotes.  Be careful though, since you are querying exact strings you might miss relevant pages that are really related with your search.  for example searching for “bill gates” could cause you to miss relevant pages containing bill gates, (without quotes).

2. Limit search to a single domain

Some websites does not have search in it and you want to easily find something on this site,well google can really help you with that you can limit your search to a single web domain by appending “site:domain name” to the search phrase.  For example, to limit a search to pages belonging only to wikipedia.org, I appended site:wikipedia.org to the search query.

3. Use wildcards for unknown terms.

This is good if you don’t know exactly what to put in the search query.  For example, if you want to query pages containing bill * gates(the * is the wildcard), the popular page that has “bill ” + any word + “gates” on them will come up.

4. Use the OR operator

To allow either one of several words.  For example if you want to look for pages containing “bill gates” or “steve ballmer” just search for “bill gates OR steve ballmer”.

5. Use the advanced search page

The advanced google search let you search for contents on the web with filters on language, date of creation, format, usage rights, geographical region and numeric range.

Don’t forget to check out Google’s new Search Options feature that came out only a few weeks ago. It lets you quickly filter by date and brings up related searches.