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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