S01 E05 Get your Gmail to do Some of the Work For You - Part One

Hello, and welcome to episode five of the Office Tech EDU Podcast, bringing you technology tips, tricks, and tutorials in bite-size pieces today for you to use at your desk tomorrow. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how with a little bit of work on your part you can get your Gmail to do some of the work for you. Now hear me out. There’s work involved, and no, it won’t automate your email, but by doing a few things ahead of time you’ll become more organized and hopefully more efficient while working in your Gmail account.

I apologize that this had to be broken up into two podcasts, but to keep it in bite-size pieces and to not bore you to death, it's been broken down. In this episode, I gave walkthroughs on how to create not only one but two signatures in your email, how to create a canned response in templates, and how to automate it, along with how to schedule an email to go out at a later date and time.

Here's the link to this episode.

Creating a signature:

• Settings
• General Settings Tab
• Scroll down
• Create New
• Save Changes

Inserting a Signature when you have more than one:

• Create email
• Select the Pen icon in the bottom right corner next to the trash can
• Select the signature you want

 Creating a canned response in Templates. 

• Settings
• Advanced
• Templates
• Enable
• Create a response in the body of an email
• Go to the three dots in the lower right-hand corner
• Hover over templates
• Select save the draft as a template
• You can overwrite an already existing template or 
• Save the template as new
• Name your canned response template

Inserting a canned response into an email:

• Place cursor in the body of your email
• Go to the three dots in the lower right-hand corner
• Hover over templates
• Select the name of the canned response template you wish to insert

Creating a filter to automate your canned response template: 

• Settings
• Filters and Blocked Email
• Create new filter
• Select a subject you want automated or Has the words
• Use common words that others use in emails to you
• Click continue
• Select Send template
• Select canned response template you wish to use
• Create Filter

Now your canned response will be automated to be sent out if an email that comes in meets the criteria you put in the filter rule boxes. 

Sending an email at a later time: 

• Compose email
• Select the drop-down arrow next to the Send button
• Select Schedule send
• Choose when to send your email

Your email is now scheduled to go out! You can see what emails are scheduled on the left-hand ribbon in your Gmail under Scheduled. When you select that, you will see all scheduled emails, and when you open one you can cancel the send schedule in there. There is no time limit for how far in the future you can schedule, the only condition is that the email address needs to be active. 

Stay tuned for part two coming soon where I'll have the time to walk you through on how to add labels to your email so you can organize them along with how to create email groups so you only have to enter in one name to send your email instead of 20 individual email addresses. 

Until next time! 

Beth