Blogs on Gmail and Google Accounts

In spite of the growing popularity of social media and messaging apps, Emails still retain their importance. We use it for all official and otherwise important and formal correspondences, all our important reports - medical, financial, professional get delivered to it, and if it is a Gmail address, then it also ties everything to its Google account, where you would typically have all your valuable documents stored and invaluable photos saved. Now imagine losing access to all of those, suddenly, over something you casually overlooked or were previously cavalier about. There are various ways one can lose access to their Google account. Some are more ubiquitous than others, so there is a very strong argument about better understanding what needs to be done to be able to keep your Google account accessible all the time. It is important to remember that this is NOT a blog on account recovery. There are several of them around (my favourite being this one ) and it is pointless to add one mor...

The original blog entry on ways to find your way around Google's email service and to perform the basic email tasks can be found here - https://blogs-on-gmail.blogspot.com/2019/02/gmail101.html .  This is a supplemental blog entry because recently, Google decided to expand Chat access to consumer users, thereby causing changes to the Gmail web and mobile apps UI. Here, we shall highlight the changes made in the Gmail standard view web UI and also answer some of the frequently asked questions related to this topic. A bit of history to begin with.  This used to be the Gmail web UI prior to its redesign in 2019: After the redesign in 2019, Gmail used to look like as shown below. Two very prominent sections in the left panel - Gmail labels (#1) on top and Hangouts (#2) below it. Thereafter, sometime in 2020, Meet was introduced in Gmail and the UI was changed again. Here, we find a third section in the left panel, for Meet (#1). Additionally, a new Support icon “?” was added (#2)...

In my blog on  Adding Image Hyperlinks in Gmail signature , I had discussed ways to insert an image to your Gmail signature from your computer or via a web URL. Soon thereafter, I became aware of an issue where images were inserted into the Gmail signature from Google Drive via web URL. To better explain, here are the steps: An image in Google Drive is set to " Anyone with the link " and the sharing URL copied. The Insert image icon in the Gmail signature area clicked, the Web URL tab chosen and the copied Drive URL pasted and the image is previewed correctly. The blue Select button is clicked. It is then the issue is noted. The image element is inserted, but as a placeholder and the image is not visible. The steps to resolve this issue are included below: The Insert image icon in the Gmail signature area clicked, the Web URL tab chosen and the copied Drive URL pasted and the image is previewed correctly. Now, instead of clicking on the blue Select button, right click on the ...