Gmail is Google’s answer to the email question. They released it to the general public in February of 2007 and since then, it has grown quickly. The site is a free email account that is paid for by advertisements appearing above the email based on the keywords found within the email address. Using it is relatively straight forward; however, as they have added more features, it can be a bit tricky.
Once you’ve made your gmail account, load it up so that you are looking at the email page. This page is where all of your emails will be. One of the perks of Gmail is that they never delete the emails. They offer more space than you’ll ever need with the hopes that you’ll click their ads.
If you want to send a new email, click the Compose Mail button. It’s on the left sidebar above the word Index and it is in a grey box itself. Once the page loads, you’ll see the typical email interface. One of the features that Gmail offers is that you can connect multiple emails into one. So, the first thing to do is select which email account you want the email to send from. While it might send from a different email, you can control–send and receive–the emails all from the one email account.
The next part is where you put in the person’s email. If you’ve added people to your address book, type the first letter of their name or their email and chances are, it’ll pop up. Select the email and then add anyone else you might want. You can add a Cc or a Bcc, but it’s not standard. Just click the two buttons if you want to.
The next section is the subject. Put whatever you want as the subject there. Gmail will alert you if you try to send an email without a subject. If you want to, just hit “OK” and proceed with sending the email. Below the subject is the “Attach a File” part. This is where you can add things to send in the email. Click that link, select the file and it uploads very quickly.
Finally, there’s the general email body. You can do some text structuring and formatting to make the email more personal. Add how ever much text you want. Directly below the email box if the send button. Hit that and the email will send. If you haven’t added a subject, it’ll alert you, but you can just skip it and have the email send. Once you’ve done that, the email is sent and just wait for the response email to automatically appear.
