Setting up a gmail account

One of the great things about the internet and computers is you can send emails. Email stands for Electronic mail. Now, what you need to do before you can send any emails is to set up an account. There are lots of different providers out there, but one of the main popular ones is having a Google mail or a Gmail account. So what we are going to do is we are going to have a look at how to set up a Gmail account directly over the internet. So what I've done here is gone on to Google.co.uk. If you're in different regions, you can go to dot com or your local region and on the screen here, there's a button here that says Sign in. Now, if you could click that and you haven't got an account yet but there is an option at the bottom here, and it says Create Account. So we click on that and then you just select who it's for this one here, we'll just say it's for myself, and then we are just putting the name in here, so we'll just call this Fred Jones. And then here, we need to create a user name, the actual email address. Now, you could only have one of these that are ever used, so if I just did Fred@gmail.com, it's highly likely that someone else has already got that. So what I'm going to do here is just going to write test E-D-S-Q. And what it is, that will then search in a second to find out whether that is a valid email address.

We need to create a password here, and again, we need to make sure the passwords are secure. So if you want to just see what the password is, you can click this and it will show you the password. So I'm just going to put in here what the password is and then you confirm the password and then hit the next button. Now that's come up with an error. What's happening here is Google is checking your password to make sure it's secure. So as you see there, we got the criteria for a password. So you need to choose a stronger password with a mix of letters and numbers and symbols. So what I did in this first time, is I had a very, very basic password. It did have some numbers and it did have some letters, however, it wasn't secure. So what we can do here is put a different word in and we do a mix of characters. And then we hit the next button and we go through to the welcome page and in here we can then put some other information. So what we need to do here is put our mobile phone number or our phone number. It's not essential, you don't have to do it. So over here, I'm just going to leave that blank. If you had another email address, you put it in there. The reason for this is, it's good for security. So supposing you lost your password, what Google can do is send a reset email to your other email address.

But if you're starting out for the first time, you don't have a second email address, so we can leave that blank as well. The next thing here is your birthday. Now, the reason they have that is, again, just to track you for security reasons. So it's just another way of making sure that if they do contact you, they know that you are the right person.  If they know your birthday it's another security feature. So we just put one here, we can pick whatever the date is, so here, I'm just going to put first of January, and we are going to have that as 1990, and then here, pop your gender down and then hit the next button. What we can also do here is you can do the settings. Now, the two ways of doing this, you can manually set it up or well through here is just the express personalisation, it makes it a lot quicker and easier to do. So you click that button. What you're doing here is then agreeing to the personalisation settings and the cookies on the website, so you can read all this and find out how they use the data and what cookies are. It's always worth reading this, don't just always click the stuff and hit confirm. And then the next one here is the privacy and terms you have to agree to. These are the Privacy and Terms policies of Google.

If you read through those and then you just click here to say you agree and then what's happened here is a long window has popped up. It says to continue in a new Chrome profile. Because I'm on Google Chrome, what it can do is it can save all my data so that I can log in and it makes it for a much better viewing experience, not only with the email but also when I'm searching the Internet. So I'm going to say yes here, so I want to link that in. And now you can change different colours and different settings, but I'm just going to leave that as it is, you can have a play with this and set things up for yourself. And you can change that whenever you want. So what we see here is the name, we set it up as Fred, if I then click on the F button on the top, I can go on to here and I can upload an image. If you want you'd rather just have the F symbol just on there. I can upload a picture of myself or whatever symbol you want and you can save those and put it whatever, whatever you want on there. There is a limit because it's just a small image in the file, so just try and have just a headshot of you, a picture of yourself or you have a dog or whatever you want to put on there.

Also from this screen here, you can see you can directly access the internet. But what we are doing now is trying to work through with the email side. So if we just hit on the Gmail button, that will take us to the email page. And this is your main Gmail web page. So as you see, it just opens up and we are just going to continue this. There is a difference with smart features is both what you're doing here just to turn them on just makes it a lot simpler for the process. So we have turned on the smart features. The next one here is you can personalise your products and then we are straight in. What it would do is, it would also go through some help screens, you can learn more about different things. So for here, it's talking about how to use Google meet. Google meet is a way of communicating through with video conferencing, we'll talk more about that in other videos. So we are just going to hit okay here. All the account settings are okay and it's telling me I have got to reload it. It's just so that it can reset all the settings, so we hit the Reload button and now we are in.

This is our Gmail account. As you can see down here is the inbox, we have got all the files, we can click here, we can look at other settings here, all the mail come in, spam email, and all of the other bits and pieces within our email settings. We are now logged in to our email, and you can see here, any emails received, and you can access all the other features of your Gmail account.