Useful key combinations to use Gmail on the Web

Turns out, merely muting a conversation in Gmail isn't the only thing you can by pressing keyboard keys in Gmail. There's a whole list of other things that you can do. If you're like me and use a bazillion operating systems, you'll find using a e-mail client a bit cumbersome. Although I still use it because I don't have to check my bazillion accounts every minute or so. Nevertheless, the preferred way for me, still, is using a simple web interface to write my e-mails.

So without further ado here are some shortcuts you can use to navigate through g-mail. I've also created a printable list so you can print it out, and stick it next to your computer, or you can write it on a sticky and keep it around as a reference.

First though, make sure you have Keyboard Shortcuts enabled in Gmail. To do this, go to Settings > Under General tab you can set keyboard shortcuts to be turned on. Beware however, if you accidently press a key, you might trigger the function of the shortcut and accidentally mute an important conversation.

List of basic Gmail Shortcuts and their functions (or rather symptoms, if you accidentally pressed the shortcut)

(Source: Stolen from Google's Documentation and improved to suit my needs, visit documentation for full list).
To save this shortcut list (it's a png file) onto your computer simply right click and save as. Also, feel free to hotlink to it. I think the simpler version is going to encourage me to use the keys more...

Gmail Shortcut Cheatsheet

To download the shortcut cheat sheet, head on over to Evan William's Website, and download the cheat sheet. Here a hotlink to the cheat-sheet, on which you can right click and click Save As.. or Save Link As.. etc.

Read More

Muting and unmuting emails (conversations) in Gmail

I was browsing through my gmail archives and I came across an e-mail that had "muted" written beside it to the left of the subject line. Unbeknownst to me I had accidentally muted the e-mails chain (called a conversation by Google, since it involved sending e-mails back and forth, kinda like instant messaging with e-mail) so every subsequent message that was sent to me directly went to my archive without even showing up in my e-mail inbox on Evolution

Yes, I know, I'm using Evolution on Ubuntu for now. However I'll most likely be switching to something more robust like Thunderbird soon, but evolution seems to fit the bill quite nicely for now. But I digress. Luckily, the conversation was unimportant, and it was kinda good that it actually went unnoticed, since it would have just been an extra boring e-mail for me to read anyway.

Turns, out, that you can mute a conversation just by pressing a key combination and then to unmute it you have to click a button. Weird. Anyway, if someone else is wondering why an e-mail they were supposed to receive is not in their e-mail client's inbox... check if you accidentally muted the conversation from Gmail's web interface.

How to check for muted e-mail in Gmail

Luckily, checking for muted e-mail is easy. Just search for is:muted using gmail's search box and gmail will show all the conversations that are muted.

How to unmute muted conversations in Gmail

To unmute conversations, you must open up the muted gmail conversation first, and then move the conversation back to your inbox. Doing so, for now, seems to be the only way to unmute a gmail conversation.

How to mute a gmail conversation

This is the part I dont like (sorta) because it makes it really easy for anyone to accidentally press the combination that is going to mute the conversation. How do you mute it? Press the M key, and the conversation will be automatically muted. Although Gmail will give you a message that the conversation was muted in its classic yellow "information" bar above the message area, I'm sure most people wont understand what just happened (including me!). I fear this might become a problem like the Firefox cursor blinking continuously, except the symptoms will be far less noticeable.

Read More

OMG! My Gmail account is experiencing errors

Wow, is it just me or is anyone else also getting the 'Server Error - Temporary Error 502 page' when they try to log-in. It's pretty weird that Gmail is doing this, and in fact as far as I can recall, it's the first time Gmail has displayed such erratic behaviour.

Read More