Tip: How to Create Gmail Filters

With the introduction of Google Buzz last week and the many emails it introduced, I’ve been actively creating more and more filters to keep my inbox clean. I thought it’d make a nice tip in case your inbox is flooded as well.

If you’re like me and signed up for newsletters, store ads, or other mailing lists, you may want to separate these emails from your more important ones. I personally think important emails should be sent to the inbox and maybe added to an additional label.

Other things from mailing lists can skip the inbox and be added under their own folder, or “label” as Google calls it.
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Gmail Themes

I love the new themes in Gmail! My favorite one to look at is the Candy theme. But I find reading my emails with it distracting. I’m currently using BubbleGum for my mail. ;) What about you?

You can view the themes by going to Settings and then Themes.

Gmail New Emoticons

Have you seen the new Emoticons in Gmail? They’re adorable!

To use them, compose a new email and click on the little happy face.

Once you click on that, a whole screen of icons will show up. Click on one to select. Enjoy!

Check out more new “stuff” at Google!

GMail Drive shell extension

Here’s a find that many of you may be interested in. ;)

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n’drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again.

When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.
You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag’n’drop like you’re used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Because the GMail files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in GMail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters in the subject) to your archived mail folder.

Please note that GMail Drive is still an experimental tool. There’s still a number of limitations of the file-system (such as total filename size must be less than 40 characters).

Source: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm