I use to use Yahoo! mail back in the day. It was available and wasn’t terrible. At the time. But this year, I’ve switched over to Gmail. And I have not looked back since.

This guide is for those who have started using Gmail but may be unaware of some of the other more powerful features Gmail has to offer. Such as…

Tasks

This is a newly released feature that gives you a simple To-Do list that lives on top of your window much the same way the chat windows do. (If you haven’t used Gchat….start using Gchat. It outweighs Facebook chat in all arenas.) It’s a very simple to use interface, and sitting on top of a page you use frequently helps as a reminder.

What’s that? You don’t use Gmail that often? You will, don’t worry. I’m just getting started.

To enable Tasks, go to your Gmail account settings, under the Labs section. You will find Tasks (as well as a lot of the other features I’ll be going over) in this menu. Select ‘Enable’, then scroll to the bottom and select “Save Changes”. These instructions will be the same for the other features, unless otherwise noted.

Google Docs Gadget

The GoogleDocs Gadget gives you quick links to your most recently opened GoogleDocs, as well as a quick-search box for the rest.

I don’t use GoogleDocs for too much, but what I do use, it comes in handy for. For example, I frequently forget some of the keyboard shortcuts to Blender (anyone who has used Blender is free to give me a hearty ‘amen’). So I made a list of the ones I frequently forget and put them in a GoogleDoc so I can access them from anywhere with an internet connection. The GoogleDocs gadget (found in the Labs) makes this even easier. Especially since nearly every click in GoogleDocs opens a new window, which is rather annoying.

Filters

Anyone who has Facebook has had their Inbox thoroughly taken over. Not that we clean out our Inboxes anyways, that’s too much work. But that does leave a bunch of pesky notifications waiting around, claiming they haven’t been read. We could turn off e-mail notifications but…..well, I’m an archive hog. I can’t stand to turn off a notification if I don’t have to.

Enter filters. Filters give you the flexibility to dictate what to filter and what Gmail does with your e-mails. For example, I have a filter set up to find any incoming e-mail from the domain ‘facebook.com’. I then have it apply the label “Facebook Notifications”, mark it as read, and then archive it.

Trust me, filters are magic and will change your life. Poke around with them.

Twitter

There is little explaining the Twitter phenomenon. When I describe micro-blogging to people, everyone agrees; it sounds stupid. Who wants constant updates to your life, limited to 140 characters? And who wants their life to be known that well. Well, apparently we humans do love to talk about our lives because it works.

The only problem I find with Twitter, is frequently, it’s annoying to get to. I don’t want to have to open up a whole ‘nother tab, and do a whole ‘nother login just so I can give a 140-character-or-less update on what’s going on *right now* which is, by this point, not *right now* anymore.

Enter the Twitter Gmail gadget. To enable this, go to the Labs section and enable “Gadgets by URL…”. This allows you to use external gadgets not developed by Google. You get a new section in your settings called “Gadgets”. Go there, add new, and enter the following URL:

http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml

This will enable your Twitter gadget. I measure the usefulness of a Twitter client, usually, by how often it makes me sign-in. This one seems to be pretty good about staying signed in. Again, though, that may be because I never close this tab.

With all these gadgets filling up your sidebar, this may be a good time to introduce:

Navbar Drag and Drop

With all the left-side modules flying around, scrolling down to see them all can be a bit of a pain. Especially if the one you use the most is on the bottom. With this Labs add-on, you can rearrange your gadgets by simply dragging them around. Convenient, eh?

Right-Side Chat & Labels

If you did everything I’ve mentioned here, even with Navbar Drag and Drop, you’ve still got a bunch of stuff to go through. If you have a wide screen, and don’t much care for the last few words of the preview you get on your e-mails, you may consider enabling Right-Side Chat and Right-Side Labels. This Labs feature will move those modules to the right side of your screeen (who’da thunk, right?). This may not look so good on a cramped monitor, but if you’ve got one of those new, fancy, wide-screen monitors, it definitely helps.

POP Mail From Other Accounts

Gmail also supports POP (sf: Post Office Protocol). Think of it as an RSS feed for e-mail, if that helps. It allows you to retrieve your e-mails from one account using a different service. So, if your other e-mail supports POP transfer, you can set your Gmail account to receive e-mail from more than one address.

I will say this, much to my disappointment, Yahoo! is not one of the services that supports POP transfer. At least, not without paying. Proceeding with my plans to abandon them are a little harder now, but no matter.

You can set up multiple accounts to receive from under Settings > Accounts tab. This is also where you can set up….

Send Mail As…

Collecting all of your accounts into one place can be more than a little convenient. But what about when you want to reply to all those e-mails? All of a sudden, they’re getting replies from people they don’t recognize, or worse, you get blocked by their obnoxiously strict Spam filter.

Enter “Send Mail As…”. Here you can set up multiple e-mail addresses that you can choose from when sending an e-mail.

Mail Goggles

Perhaps the funniest of all add-ons for regular old Gmail, this Labs feature will require you to solve a simple math problem (you get to define what “simple” means) before you are permitted to send an e-mail late at night. This feature ensures that you are in a right state of mind while writing it. Or at least sober.

Bonus for Firefox Users:

Integrated Gmail

For the Google power user, who is not satisfied with just Gmail, but also uses Google Reader for their RSS feeds, Google Calendar to plan their life, or any of the other Google services including Picasa, Maps, Groups, or News, the Integrated Gmail plugin is for you.

This plugin makes your Inbox collapsable (like all the other gadgets on your Gmail page), and adds in Google Reader and Calendar by default, with options to add in panes for several other of Google’s services.

This is an experimental plugin, which means you’ll need to sign up for an account with Mozilla to be able to use it. Being an experimental plugin, it may be subject to bugs, but I’ve been using it for a while now with minimal difficulty.

Experiment!

Google is not short on shiny new features that, in any other service, you’d have to pay to get. So, I encourage you to poke around. For myself, I use most of the above-mentioned tricks. While it hasn’t necessarily reduced the amount of time I spend online, it has at least helped make some of it a bit more productive.

The most important thing, though, is to try out different tools and see which one works best for you. I’ve used several calendar and to-do list programs (and real-life paper ones) in my life. It just so happens that integrating with my e-mail, that I check frequently, works best for me.

Hope you find this guide useful. And have fun!