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

Sometime ago, I was asked to write a Twitter thread on Gmail. Not anything fancy, but mostly things I'd do, best practices, things to focus on, etc. that even the newest and the most basic users of Gmail can follow to adopt.  That tweet was appreciated by many and I was asked to create a blog out of it, with some added details. So here we go... First, choose an inbox layout that helps maximize your purpose for using Gmail. Your inbox should be a dashboard. Experiment with various Firsts, Priority Inbox, even Multiple Inboxes to see what suits your workflow the best. For details, you can read up:  https://support.google.com/mail/answer/18522 . The layout you select in the Gmail standard web UI will also reflect in the Gmail mobile app. The default Gmail compose window is placed at the bottom right. Expanded, it is placed at the center of the screen. Use Ctrl/Cmd+click or Shift+click to open the Gmail compose window in another tab or window.  One of the easiest ways to keep the Gmail

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) and