when somebody sends you an email there
are a few different things that you can
do in addition to reading the email you
may want to reply to it or forward it to
someone else or snooze the email and
temporarily hide it until you need it
or maybe the email has an attachment
that you want to view or download let's
start by looking at our inbox for each
message you'll be able to see the sender
the subject and maybe a little bit of
the body of the message and also the
date that it was sent if the message is
unread then the text will be bold and
the background will be a different color
so these are the messages that I have
not read yet and these are the ones that
I have read if I hover over an email a
few options appear on the right I can
quickly archive or delete the email mark
it as read or snooze the email which
temporarily removes it from your inbox
for a set amount of time I'm going to
click on this message so I can read it
you can read the message here and you
can click the drop down arrow if you
want to see more information about who
sent the message and who the recipients
are after you read the message you can
go back to your inbox or click one of
these arrows to view a different message
for really important messages you may
want to add a star by clicking here this
will help you find the message later on
if you want to quickly respond to a
message you can use the smart reply
options here or you can click reply and
respond to just the sender or you can
click reply to all which will include
all of the original recipients you can
also forward the message to someone else
in this case I want to reply to all so
that everybody stays in the loop
then you can type your message you'll
notice that the original message is
quoted here most of the time it's a good
idea to leave it in because it helps to
remind the person which message you're
replying to and when you're done you can
click send
now if you're emailing back and forth
with someone Gmail will group those
messages into a conversation and in your
inbox there will be a number that shows
how many messages there are in that
conversation if you want to expand a
specific message you can just click on
it and then you can click in this area
again to minimize it conversations keep
your inbox from getting too cluttered
with lots of separate messages and it's
also just nice to be able to see the
whole conversation at once sometimes you
may receive an email that has an
attachment in this case the attachment
is a PDF I can download it or save it to
Google Drive but with some file types
you'll only have the download option I
can also click it to see a preview now
you should be careful when opening
attachments some files may contain
viruses so if you don't know why someone
is sending you an attachment or if it
just looks suspicious it's best not to
open it if you use Gmail at work you may
sometimes need to set up a vacation
reply which will automatically respond
to emails when you're away you can do
this by going to your settings scroll
down until you see vacation responder
and then you can type a message when
somebody sends you an email this message
will automatically be sent to them to
let them know that you are unable to
answer emails you may want to include a
phone number where you can be reached or
the name and email address of somebody
else that they can contact while you're
away
also you may want to only send a
response to people in your contacts to
avoid giving your whereabouts and
contact info to complete strangers when
you're done click Save Changes
when your vacation reply is active
you'll see this bar at the top of the
screen and you can just click end now to
turn off the vacation reply
so those are some of the ways that you
can respond to emails using Gmail
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