GMail Basics

NIST uses the browser-based Gmail system for emails.

Please take a look at what we think are some of the first things you need to do to get your GMail setup properly.

Logging in

Simply open up a browser and head on over http://www.google.com and log in with your usual NIST username and password.

Set as default

Your first step is to set GMail as the default email application. From a GMail browser window/tab in Chrome, you will see a double-diamond icon at the right end of the URL/Search Bar. Click this and select “Use Gmail” -> “Done.” This will ensure that clicking email links (including the email functions in Veracross) will compose the email in Gmail.

If you do not see the double-diamond icon as shown in the screenshot above and email links do not automatically open in GMail, then follow these instructions. Copy and paste the following URL into your google chrome browser, chrome://settings/handlers. Click on the 3 dots next to mail.google.com and click remove, as seen in the screenshot below. After doing this, refresh GMail and you should now see the double-diamond icon.

Composing

Of course, the main thing you’ll be doing within your account is writing and reading emails, so you’ll become familiar with the ‘Compose’ button in the top-left corner.

Settings

This will help you get ‘under the hood’ of your Gmail account. Please click here to make changes to customize your Gmail account. This is where you can adjust things like your picture, signature, fonts, auto-reply, etc. Click the gear icon in the top-right and go down to Settings.

Your Picture

Your staff picture from Veracross will be automatically pushed daily from Veracross to GMail. This is done to ensure consistency of photos to assist recognition.

Signatures

Staff accounts are created with a signature. If any changes required, please click Settings to edit the relevant information and save the changes at the bottom.

Conversation View

This falls under the love/hate category — some folks love to have emails of the same topic all grouped together, others prefer to maintain the chronological nature of all emails. We’d recommend trying both and seeing which one works best for you.

Click on the Gear icon in the top-right corner –> Settings –> Enable/Disable Conversation View.

Enabling Preview Pane

By default Gmail does not have a preview pane for emails, meaning that you will have to click on an email and open it to see its contents. To enable the preview pane follow the steps in this short video:

Undo Send

Did you really mean to send that email?? Rather, did you notice right as you hit send that you wrote ‘thier’ not once, not twice, but thrice? ‘Undo Send’ will allow you to cancel the sending process and fix any errors. Use the timer drop-down to determine how much second-guessing you’d like to do.

Chat

A very handy feature for when you have a quick message to send to someone, but don’t want to go through the trouble of writing out a whole email. Only works if people have it enabled.

Out of office

For vacation time or planned absences, you can set up an auto-reply  here.

Labels (the New Folders)

If you were a fan of using folders in Outlook, Gmail has its own (more powerful) system for organization, called labels. This is a little more complicated, so I’m going to let Google people explain the process. Please click this link for a walk-through.

Calendar

To learn more about Google Calendar, please visit this link.

For adding GMail to your mobile devices, see this related post.