Gmail Gmail - Confidential Mode Sometimes you need to provide secure information to someone else, and email is the easiest way to do that. While the ease of sending an email is certainly a plus, there is a requirement to be aware of the security risks that come with sending students’ personally identifiable information (PII). In the event you need to send sensitive information, the Confidential Mode in Gmail is there to help you. Confidential emails will be passcode protected, and will automatically expire after your determined length of time. In addition, the recipient may not forward, copy, print, or download the email. To start, visit your Gmail. Click on “Compose.” I recommend setting up your confidential settings before you type the email so that you don’t forget to do it. Click on the small lock icon on the bottom toolbar. This will bring up the confidential mode settings screen: Set an expiration. After this date, the email will automatically be removed from the recipient’s inbox. Choose to require a passcode. This passcode will be sent as a text message to the recipient if they use Gmail, if not, they will receive a separate passcode via email. Click the “Save” button. This will turn the message top bar blue, and it will show the confidential mode option below the email body. Go ahead and proceed with your email as normal, then click send. If the user doesn’t have a phone number in their profile, you will be asked to manually type one. At this point, the recipient(s) should have received a verification email. When the recipient(s) click on the send passcode button, they will be prompted to enter the code that was just sent to the number you provided. At this point, the email will be displayed until the expiration date is met. Originally posted by Cory Robbins on the West Fork Technology Hub (2023-09-13). GMail Filters and Labels - Organize and Simplify Your Inbox Gmail Filters and Labels Let’s face it… Email is annoying. We all send messages to locations, and we expect for them to be read by the recipients, but we also receive messages through the same platform, and honestly, responding can be a pain! You have all of the junk email, spam, phishing attempts, random reply-alls that should only have ever been a reply, and list serves full of people that ask the same question in six different threads at the same time. What a mess!!! While I can’t promise you that filters and labels will fix all of this, I can promise that setting the up allows for your important things, or similar messages, to be categorized and easy to distinguish from the rest of the cluster. Let’s break down the process… Finding a Pattern Show contents To begin, we have to find a way to distinguish our target emails from other messages. Think of this like a search term in Google. We want a way to get the emails we need to act on and ONLY those emails. Sometimes this is super easy, let’s use a mailing list as an example… Let’s say that all of your “How To Be a Master Educator” messages come from list@awesome-educator.com. It is probably a pretty safe bet that you can use that email address sender as your pattern. It isn’t going to accidentally return messages you don’t want to include. So, that’s cool, but sometimes it is a little more complicated. In this example, we will look at emails coming from DocFlow, the system we use for registration and various other campus forms. If you are someone who receives messages from DocFlow, you may get several, and these emails will usually indicate different tasks and different overall workflow purposes. All of these emails come from the sender docflow@wftigers.org, so if we create a filter using just that email, all of our workflows will be combined into a single label. That means that, depending on who you are, job applications, purchase order notices, facility requests, and other various things would all go to the same filter. That’s probably not what you want. In these sorts of situations, we need to look at the subject or the body of the message to find common patterns. In this example, we will look at the Kindergarten Roundup form. A message from this form will include the following: Sender: docflow@wftigers.org Subject: New Round-Up Submission - Student Name Sometimes we might have to look at the body of the message, but, for our use case, the subject and sender will be enough. We can look for any email coming from that email address with a subject containing “New Round-Up Submission.” I’ll ignore the hyphen to avoid any weirdness with special characters that MIGHT happen. This should be totally sufficient to catch what we want, and nothing more. Creating a Filter Show contents Now that we have a grasp on finding patterns, let’s create a filter using that pattern. I’ll keep using the DocFlow example of Round-Up. In Gmail, click on the little advanced search button. This will open the advanced search pane, and we will be able to use any combination of these items to create our filter. I’ll use the pattern options we defined above to fill out the form. I’ll ignore the date options for now. At this point, I’ll click on “Create filter.” This will open the filter pane, and it provides us with several options that we will go over in the next section… Choosing Actions Show contents We understand finding patterns, and we know how to turn those patterns into a filter. Now, let’s look at the actions available to us in the filter pane to get the most out of our understanding. This is going to be used very often. What it means, when used by itself, is that you will not see your email within your inbox, ever, it will automatically act as if you hit the archive button within the message. Most of the time, though, you will use this will labels, meaning that the message will ONLY go to the label and will entirely “skip the inbox.” This will automatically mark the message the same as if you had opened it. I don’t ever use this one, but I’m sure someone has a good use of it! The star option is like a favorites function for your email. It is a sort of quick label, and all of the matching messages will go into this same area. Again, I don’t use this, but it might be good as a sort of “I’m currently working on” type of organization method. This is the magic one, or at least, this is the one we will primarily focus on. A label can be thought of as a folder of sorts. They can be nested (one inside of another), and they can be named whatever you want. If you already have a label you want to use, you will be able to choose it by clicking on “Choose label.” If you need to create one, clicking on “Choose label” will allow you to create a new one as well. This is something that I do use, but might not be helpful to everyone. This is good for when pesky vendors won’t send invoices to the accounting email instead of to me. This is a full delete, not an archive. You should really only use this on rare occasions unless it is part of a bigger workflow that would be beyond the scope of this tip. Do you ever get emails from somewhere you know is legit, but it keeps going to your spam? This is the option you would use for that circumstance! Templates are cool, but they are also beyond the scope of this tip. Selecting this action will make your email stand out by activating the little chevron dude next to the email. This does the opposite of the one above. This is like the automated version of labels, and I never use them. This will let you put an email into either “Social,” “Updates,” “Forums,” or “Promotions,” the default list of categories within Gmail. This is why we ignored the date options in the prior step. Checking this box will apply the filter to all of the past conversations (message threads) in the past, as long as they meet the filter. It gives you a handy count of the conversations that will have the filter applied also! Labels and Organization Show contents Now that we understand our action options, let’s go ahead with building the Round-Up filter. Select “Skip the inbox (Archive it).” Select “Apply the label” We don’t already have a Round-Up label, so we need to make one. click on “Choose label…” Click on “New label…” I’ll enter “Round-Up Forms” (or whatever) in the label name. If you want to nest the label under another one, you can check the box and choose some already existing labels. Click on the “Create” button. We are all set, so now click on “Create filter” At this point, we should now see the label listed on the left. That label shows as not having any unread messages. When you get a new message, the label will be brighter, and it will also have a number to the right. We can also go further by color coding our labels. To do that, hover to click on the three dots, choose “Label color,” then choose the color you want. Wrapping Up That’s it! Hopefully you can see how handy this feature is. And we really only scratched the surface. Do some experimenting, and maybe even look into the featured called “Multiple inbox sections.” you can use this to accomplish something like this screenshot, where each of the areas on the right (you pick the name and amount you want) automatically show the messages with the label of your choosing. Originally posted by Cory Robbins on the West Fork Technology Hub (2024-04-02). Gmail Signatures Email signatures have come a long way since their humble beginnings of allowing an email program to automatically type your name at the bottom of an email message. Today there is a wide variety of information added to email signatures. Here are some of the more common items: Bitmoji or headshot Your name and title Department or campus where you work Phone and/or fax number Address (and link to online directions) Social media icons (each linked to your social media presence) School/district mascot Inspirational quote or quote related to your field of expertise Digital badges showing your areas of expertise Perhaps you don’t have a Gmail signature or like me haven’t updated it in years. This is a quick refresher on where to access signature settings in Gmail. With Gmail open click on the settings gear in the upper right. Then click See all settings Scroll down to the Signature section and make your edits. You can customize text, add hyperlinks, pictures, and much more! Don’t forget to scroll down and click Save Changes. Consider creating a second, smaller signature file and using it for replies and forwards. Alternatively, there are a number of websites and templates to generate a “fancier” signature file. Just do a quick Google search and follow the instructions for Gmail. Originally posted by Carl Clements on the West Fork Technology Hub (2023-02-28). Gmail - Unsubscribe from Mass Emails The longer you use an email address the more likely it is you will start receiving mass emails that you either no longer want or for which you never signed up. Here are two quick ways to unsubscribe from unwanted mass emails. Note option one is the safest and easiest option. Google has added an unsubscribe link next to the address of messages it recognizes as mass emails. If you no longer wish to receive emails from the sender, simply click the Unsubscribe link. If there is not an unsubscribe link provided by Gmail, there should be a link toward the bottom of the email. The exact wording will vary depending on the sender but it will typically have the word unsubscribe. Remember to hover and check the link before clicking on it as we practiced in the Cybersecurity training, With the second method, there is often another hoop or two to jump through. Typically a webpage will load prompting you to confirm you want to unsubscribe. Originally posted by Carl Clements on the West Fork Technology Hub (2023-09-05). Create Gmail Groups and Add Contacts If there is a group of people you contact regularly it makes sense to create a contact group in Gmail to save a few minutes. To begin, log in to your school Gmail account. Click on the waffle icon to the right of the screen and select Contacts. Scroll down a bit to the Labels section and click the plus sign. Create a name for the Group There are several ways to add contacts to a group. Here is the method I prefer: Type in a name in the search bar and select the contact you want to add. Click the + Label Button Click the name of the group. Click Apply Repeat this process until all members have been added to the group. Return to Gmail. Compose a message and begin typing the name of the group. It will auto-populate and tell you how many recipients will be included. Complete the message as desired and send normally. Originally posted by Carl Clements on the West Fork Technology Hub (2024-01-24). Turning Off Group Email Notifications Email groups are great, but they can sometimes be… a little much… Google allows you to set your subscription settings on a per-group basis. This means that you can stay in a group, meaning that you can email that group, but you don’t have to receive all of the notifications. First, we need to access the Groups page. Open up a chrome tab. Click the waffle icon Click on Groups (you might have to scroll) You should see each group you are in. Within the subscription column, you can choose from 4 options Each email - This is the default. You get an email for every message Digest - You get a single email each day with the full contents of all messages for that group. Abridged - You get a summary of of all emails sent in a single email each day No email - You will not get any emails from this group. There isn’t a save function. Just select the option you want, and then you are good to go. If you disable email, it might be good practice to visit this page more often. Clicking on a group name will let you view all messages. Originally posted by Cory Robbins on the West Fork Technology Hub (2022-09-19).