Video transcript
This video will walk you through the general settings of your Gmail account. First off, we need to open up our Gmail account. Done. Secondly, you can get your settings actually in couple of different ways, but the way I’m going to show you is by coming up here to the right corner and hitting this drop-down arrow next to this gear icon and as you hover over that you can see it says settings, but there’s a few other items in here as well, so we want to come on down here and select settings and then left click on that, and here we are under the settings general.
Right up here at the top, you can display the language that will be shown. Mine by default is English. If you use the phone chat, you can adjust the default country code and maximum page size. This just shows the number of conversations or contacts per page.
If we open up my Gmail in another tab here, this is what we’re talking about. currently, mine is set to 50 so if I had 100 of them in here, then it would show 50 on page 1, then a little icon down here or up here that says, go to page 2 or the next page; or we can adjust that all the way up to 100.
I myself in my other more active accounts, I would show 100. In that way, I just have more on the page that I can navigate through. Likewise with contacts per page.
External content. Gmail tends to restrict showing images for example because some hackers will use images as a way to inject Trojans or malicious code into your Gmail account and as such, Gmail by default, not show a lot of images until you tells Gmail otherwise. With this checked, Gmail already has a list of trusted senders. When you want to learn more, you can just click on that link there. That they do show those images. Like Ford or General Motors and such. But if you don’t want that, then you can only just tick this box here. Ask before displaying external content. This is probably a more safe way but this is the default and really isn’t that bad. Totally up to you.
Browser connection. Always use HTTPS. In the settings that I have right now, that is the only option available to me and you can also click here to learn more about that, but as it says here under my particular settings, to adjust this out of using HTTPS always, I have to do so through my browser settings. Default reply behavior. Both the default reply behavior and the default textiles are just that defaults. You can make further adjustments in the e-mails themselves but if you don’t want to make adjustments there, you can adjust the default settings right here.
Conversation view. I prefer this to be on. Let me show you what I’m talking about here. If we come up here to my e-mails, you see right here there’s a number 2 right here in this particular e-mail that I’ve received. That means that there are 2 conversations taking place related to the same e-mail. If we open this up, you can see that both of those conversations are in the same box and that’s because conversation view is on. If this were off, then these 2 e-mails would be separate e-mails. That can be rather confusing especially if you have a lot of conversations in your various e-mails. You’d have to go through and hunt those down to be able to see them all similar to that of a threaded conversation or comments section in a blog. So for me, conversation view should always be on. Again, another personal preference. As you’ll find that’s the case with a lot of the stuff in here, just personal preferences.
Send in Archive. I have this to show on mine but you can hide that as well.
Stars and important. These guys here are pretty much the same thing in so far as the way to organize your e-mails and by default, you only have the one gold star, or yellow star. You can adjust this by adding 4 stars to choose from or all stars to choose from. I, myself, do not use this option. I use labels instead.
Desktop notification. Pretty self explanatory there. You also, if it’s set up, have a desktop notification for chats as well as those for your e-mails.
Keyboard shortcuts. By default, with the keyboard shortcuts being turned off, you still have access to some of the basic keyboard shortcuts within your Gmail account but there are some more advanced shortcuts that are not enabled. To get them enabled, you can learn more about that here and you would just check this radio button here.
Button labels. Right now they’re on icons. If you come on up here you can see these are the icons that I’m referring to. If you want those to be listed as text instead, you would just check that radio button and then instead of this being an icon for archive, it would actually say Archive. Likewise with this, it would say report spam instead of having the icon there. Basically the default setting, you get both. You hover over this and you have the icon and the text. If you want to include an image of yourself or an image period in all of the e-mails that you send out, this is where you go to do that.
The people widget. If you want to have information about that person that you’re receiving e-mail from showing up over here on the right, then this is the radio button you want to check. By default, that’s what it is. If you want to hide that, then you can just check that radio button.
Unlike with many of these other ones here, you can just click on the Learn More option to find out more details about this particular feature.
Create contacts for auto complete. By default, Gmail automatically adds these to your contacts list. If you don’t want that, then you can just check that radio button there and just add them yourself. I, myself, prefer that this be automatic. In that way I can always delete those automatically added contents but I may not always remember to add those contacts. That’s why I prefer it to be automatic.
Important signals for ads. You can adjust that however you want.
Signature. This is pretty important. Right now, by default, no signature is checked. If you want to add a signature, you can put in here whatever you want and every time you send out an e-mail, this is going to be your default signature. For example, if you want to put in here a company website URLS and maybe some catch line, whatever you want to put in here is totally up to you and you’ve got these formatting options as well.
Personal level indicators. Play around this as much as you want to see if this is an item that you want to be activated.
Under snip it, I prefer to have a snip that’s shown. It just gives me a little bit more of an idea as to what I might be looking at in that e-mail and if it’s something that’s not too important based on the snip it that I see, then I can always just skip that and come back to it later.
Location responder. Pretty handy. Pretty self explanatory. If you plan on being away from your Gmail account for any length of time, then you can put in an auto responder of sorts that will go out to the people that sent you e-mails saying basically whatever you want to put in here. I’m on vacation right now, I’ll get back to you as soon as I get back.
And outgoing message encoding. I would just leave this at default unless you find the need to change this but more times than not, the default setting is the way you should go. And then any adjustments you make here, be sure to click on save changes, otherwise, they’re not going to take.
That’s going to being us to the end of this video on your general settings tab in your Gmail account. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.
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Related Posts:
- Gmail Introduction: User Interface Tour
- Gmail Introduction: Customize Your User Interface
- Gmail Introduction: Compose, Send and Receive Messages
- Gmail Introduction: Gmail Settings
- Gmail Introduction: Labels
- Gmail Introduction: Gmail’s New Tabs
- Gmail Introduction: Organizing Your Emails With Gmail’s Filters
- Gmail Introduction: Adding and Editing Contacts
- Gmail Introduction: Gmail Labs
- Gmail Introduction: Gmail Analytics
