Searching

Episode #10: Searching

Learn the powerful ways you can search for items in Gmail. Search for conversations to a person, from a person, with certain words in the subject, labels, attachments, or any combination.

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Personal Level Indicators

Quickly identify which messages were sent directly to you, others, or a list by scanning the index with personal level indicators.

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Send Mail As

Episode #11: Manage multiple email accounts with Gmail.

This short effective tip will teach you how to forward email from many other accounts to Gmail and responding to them as if they came from the original site.

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Contact Pictures

Gmail has added another nice feature to the contacts list. Listen to this show to find out how you can see images of your contact, set your own image, or override their images. Please note that this feature is currently only available to users with US/English language settings as of this recording. I also include a quick tip for you to save time when emailing other Gmail users!

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Gmail Notifier

The Gmail Notifier is a free utility from Google that allows you to receive email notifications to your Gmail account without opening a browser or mail client. Find out how to get it and some of the neat configuration options it has.

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Take Action

Learn how to select more than 100 messages at a time.

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Google Notifier for the Mac

Despite the “beta” label, Google Notifer for the Mac v1.9.65 is available for download. You can find it here. It’s a handy way to keep tabs on your Google Calendar and Gmail account without firing up the browser and logging in to Gmail. If you need to get to either of those items, they are only one click away.

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HTML Signatures

While the Signatures option in the general Gmail settings allows plain text only, there is a way you can leverage Google Docs to help you create a signature with different fonts, styles, and even images. Listen to this episode of the Gmail Podcast and find out how.

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Google Alerts

Learn how to use Google Alerts as part of your Gmail account to know when your favorite topics are found on the web.

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More HTML Signatures

In an earlier episode of the Gmail Podcast I described how to do HTML signatures using Google documents to copy and paste the content. Thanks to listener Bob, there is an easier way using Greasemonkey.

Step 1 involves installing Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you manage other scripts. You can find it at www.greasespot.net. This is a pretty straight forward download and install to Firefox so I won’t get in to the details here.

Step 2 involves downloading and installing the actual HTML script for Greasemonkey which I have included in the text of this show available on the web site.

http://gootch2.googlepages.com/htmlsig.user.js

Once Greasemonkey and the script are installed, you are ready for step 3 – Editing the signature. Right click on the monkey icon on the bottom of your Firefox screen and select “manage user scripts”. You should see a selection on the left that reads “HTML Signatures for GMail”. Highlight that by clicking on it and then click on the “Edit” button.

Here is where things get a little technical. Stick with me and we’ll get through this together… The first time you click Edit, you may be asked to locate a text editor. On Windows you can navigate to C:\Windows\Notepad.exe. On a Mac I suggest using TextEdit in the Applications folder.

Once you have chosen your text editor, you will see the actual script that does all the hard work. You don’t need to be a fluent JavaScript programmer to modify this. Just find the line about half way down that says “var htmlsignature =. Change the text between the quotes. By default it reads Edit the script to change this signature, with some HTML tags. If you are comfortable with HTML, be creative and have fun. If you aren’t, start by just modifying the text and see what happens. When you are done, save your file and close the dialog box in Firefox for the Greasemonkey script.

Remember, good email etiquette suggests you keep your signatures short. Four to six lines of text is a good rule of thumb.

To test your creation, compose a new email in Gmail. You should see your signature pop in the message body automatically. If you want to change your signature at any time, go back and repeat step 3 of this process.

That’s it for using Greasemonkey to create HTML signatures in Gmail. I’ve installed it, confgured it, use it, and love it. Although, I have to admit that I did spend most of my time tweaking the HTML to get the styles just right.

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