How to Rule Gmail by Hacking It

The last few days my Facebook Feed has been cluttered with people amazed that Gmail has an “unsend” button hidden within Gmail Labs. As someone who has used this feature since 2011 I’ve been less than impressed with their amazement. However it made me realize I should share my Gmail Ninja status with others so I have compiled a top five list of Gmail Hacks that are awesome.

Boomerang for smart email reminders

It’s a built-in email management system that’s super easy to use. There are two great features that Boomerang offers.

First, it lets you schedule an email to be sent at a certain time (useful if you wrote it at midnight but want the person to get it at 9:30 a.m. ). You write the email and instead of hitting send you press send later, then adjust the time and date, easy-peasy.

The other thing I love is the follow-up reminder option. If person X doesn’t get back to you within 1 day/ 1 week/ 1 month (you can adjust this) the email you sent them gets Boomeranged to the top of your mailbox, making sure you know to follow up again.

FindBigMail lets you find and delete big attachments

Gmail offers huge storage capacities for free,15GB to be precise, shared between Google Drive, Gmail and your Google+ photos. However, if you’re a email hoarder and tend to get lots of big attachments (or sync your work email with your Gmail) you might find yourself nearing the free limit and then have to think about purchasing more storage. The easiest way to solve this is to delete a few emails, but it’s hard to know which out of the thousands have the 1GB attachments. There is no built-in way of sorting that and that’s where FindBigMail comes in.

It’s a free service that sorts through your emails for size of attachments, and then categorizes its findings by labeling them in sizes, including “over 5MB,” “over 10MB.”
It shares with you a summary of results after it has scanned through your folders and highlights the twenty largest emails, which makes it easy to delete them immediately. Win.

WiseStamp gives you rocking email signatures

Want a super awesome signature but don’t want to use the built in Gmail version? Try Wisestamp. It gives you FREE awesome sign offs in your email, that looks very professional and highlights your social media outlets in a cool visual way. Free to use the basic plan, with varying fees for more options.

You can customize everything from your font size and color to embedded social icons, graphics and an automated URL link to your latest blog posts, through an RSS feed. Pretty sweet, huh? I love that it lets you store multiple versions to use with different people, which you can change from your Chrome browser plugin.

Undo Send lets you stop emails in their tracks

Ever sent an awkward email you heavily regret? No easy way out? Well, since 2011 Gmail has had an “undo send” feature which I regularly utilize. Here’s how to get it.

Go to Gmail. Settings. Labs. Select Undo Send and press enable. Now you have a few seconds to retract that angry email. In case you’re wondering, Gmail doesn’t give you exact number of seconds – it’s like 2-3 seconds — but in any case yay, technology.

Gmail stars for easy email sorting

You might already know that you can “yellow star” an item in Gmail, but did you know you can also add exclamation points, green starts, purple ticks and more? By enabling that setting within the Labs tab, it allows you to click on the “star” option and keep cycling through different options. Useful if you want to yellow star items related to Groupon for example, and assign a Green star for work, etc.

Now enjoy being a Gmail Ninja!