Essential Digital Skills Level 1

111 videos, 7 hours and 55 minutes

Course Content

Basic gmail settings

Video 27 of 111
5 min 6 sec
English
English
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Once you have set up your Gmail account, you can change loads of settings. What we are going to do is have a look at some basic ones. Now, there are loads and loads of settings we are not going to cover because they are advanced and you probably won't ever need any of them, but there are loads of help screens within Google Mail and Gmail, and you can find that information if you need. But to start with it just look at how to adjust the settings.

If you go up to the top right-hand corner, you will see a cog icon. Click that, and then just click on here, it says, "see all settings," this will go to the whole settings within the Gmail suite. Then the first one it comes up with is the general settings, this is where you can change the default language if you wanted do to change that. Just click on it and it will open up, and you can change it to Spanish or American English, whichever you want. And also, within here is loads of other little settings you can do, you can look at how many emails you want on any page, or in your inbox how many are there, you need to look at any other settings you want. Some of the other options here we are going to skip, but the settings on here are all about the email, how it functions, how it works.

We mentioned on an earlier video about auto-correct, that's on there as well, so if you want to turn your auto-correct off, if you are making spelling mistakes, things like that. As you can see there are loads of different things you can set should you need to use them. If you want to change them, you just would go to the very bottom and you can hit the Save button. This bit here might be useful to you, it's the art of office reply. So this would be, supposing you are going on holiday and you're unable to answer any of your emails, but you do want to just tell people you've had their email and you will answer it later on, or it may be you're just going away from work and you just need to tell people you will be able to answer them back on Monday. What you can do here is just change this, so you just put a little tick in this box here, it says, "Out of office reply," we can say the first date of it, just click on it, we can set where we want it, so we are going to say here we got a Friday, and then what's the last day is optional, you can leave it open-ended if you want, but we are just going to say the last day of it, we are going to be back on this Monday, the 30th.

You can then put the subject line and it says, "Sorry, but I am out of the office." And then put something in the body, "Hi, thank you for emailing me, I'm really sorry, but I'm out of the office until Monday, unable to get to my emails, but I will reply to you on my return." That's the sort of thing you can put on there. And you can also select on here, "Only send a response to people in my contacts" if you want, but if someone's emailing you, it might be a good idea to send it back to them, but it might be you don't want to send it to people, but that's the choice is yours. Then you just hit the Save button that will save that, and then it will return you back to the screen. What we are going to do next is just move on to some other settings. And just going along the top there is labels, you can label different emails and look at how the function of your inbox is working, more information about importing data, so if you have got an existing email account, you can bring data into it, but this one might be useful to you is the filtering and blocked addresses. What you can do with this, you set up filters, so if someone... Say you're getting some emails from spam emails, which is just junk emails, you just want to stop them coming into your inbox, you can lock it here, or maybe someone has been abusive to you and you want to stop any emails coming through to you, you can block them.

So to do a simple block, we just create a new filter, we look at who the email is from, so just put "1@example.com," and then we go down and we just click this button here that says, "Create a filter". What we are going to do is say what we are going to do with it, so we don't want emails from this person, we just want to delete them. What we can do is delete it, create the filter, and then that's now set up a filter. If we ever get an email through, "I@example.com," we will never see that in our inbox, it's just been deleted. This is a really good way of blocking the junk email you are getting, but also if you need to get rid of an email from somebody.

Now the other thing you might find is useful is the forwarding side. What you can do here is you can forward an email to somebody, so if you are going on holiday, and you want to forward your emails to a family member or a work colleague, you can literally click the button that says "Forwarding", entering the email address there, and then you can set it so that you can forward the emails to them. The important thing is, when you get back, you got to remember to take that forwarding off, so once it's been set on, you need to make sure you turn it off when you come home, otherwise they are going to carry on getting your emails.

The other settings up here are just the internal settings about using Google Meet and also email settings and the themes, the look and the feel of how your email works and looks. The important thing is, if you change any of the settings in here, always make sure you save them, otherwise they are not going to be saved. So literally go here, so if we did change anything on here, if I changed that box, you would see how it's popped up, "save settings." We can hit the button and that will save it automatically and when you do save it, it reverts it back to the screen, and all those settings are now saved.

Learning Outcomes:
  • EDSQ Unit 4 LO 11.2