How organized is your Gmail account? Yeah, that’s what I thought. These tips can help.

If you’re like me, your Gmail account probably wasn’t that organized to begin with. Now, with all the new changes and updates you’ve just decided to accept the fact that the very important email message from five years ago is lost forever. Rather than sobbing “you win, Gmail” and accepting defeat, here are some simple steps you can take to quickly and painlessly find anything you need in your Gmail inbox.

Search Gmail with “From:” or “To:”

If you at least know who the email message was to or from, you can enter his or her name after “from:” or “to:” in the Gmail search bar, and it will pull up every message written to or received from that person. Don’t include any spaces after the colon. This method is far more helpful than just searching “Karen Johnson” and bringing up every email that includes the name Karen, from every person named Karen, since you signed up for Gmail.

Use the Hyphen (-) to Eliminate Terms

When searching a person’s name in Gmail, every incidence of contact with that person will be included in the search results. Yes, this means that every Tweet notification or Facebook message that is connected to your email account, will show up. If you want to search your email, but avoid the noise of certain results, add a hyphen next to the word you’d like to eliminate.

For example, when searching for Leonardo DiCaprio, and omitting annoying Twitter notifications, I would search Leonardo DiCaprio –Twitter and I would get zero search results. How odd.

Search Gmail Messages with Attachments

Never again must you slog through 300 emails to find an attachment that you didn’t download and save immediately. Instead, add “has:attachment” to your search to filter all emails that have an attachment. Even better, include “from:(insert name) has:attachment” and the results will only contain emails with attachments from that person. For example:  “from:Karen Johnson has:attachment” (without quotes).

Specify Terms With Parenthesis

Never mind that you can’t remember why you subscribed to the Men In Socks Newsletter – if you want to search all of the Men In Socks emails and want only the newsletters, you can search from:Men In Socks (newsletter OR socks sale) and all messages from Men In Socks with the term “newsletter” or “socks sale” will appear in your search results.

This is especially convenient if you want to unsubscribe from the Men In Socks fan club because you can simply click the “unsubscribe” link, which by law, must be included in the message. Unsubscribing from newsletters you don’t read, sent by stores you don’t shop at, or organizations in which you are no longer interested in or involved, is a huge step in organizing your inbox.

Search Gmail Chat Messages

Besides occasionally wanting to re-read love letters sent via chat, once in a while you may need to locate a link or other important information delivered via Gmail chat. If you need to find something that was included in a chat message, simply search using “is:chat”. Add parenthesis around key words to find specific information.

For Example: from:Robert Downey, Jr. is:chat (marry me)

No results again. Weird.

In the end, hopefully you will be a little closer to winning at Gmail. At the very least, you will be able to find all of those important messages a little quicker – and without spending days scrolling through hundreds of irrelevant emails.

Related on EcoSalon:

15 Ways That Are Better for Corresponding Than Email

Geek Hack: My Monthly Cycles Email Alerts

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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Email is old news, and it’s getting less efficient by the day.

Chances are, you’re still using email for all kinds of communication throughout each day – personal letters, quick messages, business communications, group memos and sending files. But there’s also a good chance that email is far from the best way to accomplish that communication. It’s impersonal and inefficient, and you’re taking a chance of getting lost in the shuffle of coupons, inane chain letters and invitations to enlarge certain anatomical parts. Here are 15 alternatives for online use and off, for both business and personal purposes.

Letters

Sending a personal note to a friend or family member? If your message is longer than a few sentences, do it the old-fashioned way.  Now that letter writing has nearly died off altogether, receiving a hand-written letter in the mail is like getting a gift. It’s nice to be able to hold something in your hand, but there’s more to it than that. Something about the blank pages of actual stationery encourages us to be more poetic with our language, to meander a little in our correspondence, share more of ourselves than we would when staring at a blinking cursor on a computer screen.

Texting

For those moments when your message just can’t wait, nothing beats texting. It’s quick, it’s short and you can be pretty confident that your recipient will see it fairly quickly. It used to be that texting was reserved for people you know well – like friends and family – but its use in the business world has grown a lot in recent years. While texting can be great for messages like the time and place to meet a client, keep it brief and save serious or sensitive topics for phone calls or face-to-face meetings.

Chat

Don’t rely on email when you just need some quick back-and-forth communication. These days, most of us don’t compulsively check our email like we used to, especially when our inboxes are packed with junk and messages that are pretty low on our priority lists. Gchat, Skype and Facebook Messages are just a few options that are superior to email when you need to ask a quick question but aren’t on familiar enough terms to text.

Facebook Messages

Considering that pretty much everybody is on Facebook, it’s not surprising to hear that the social network’s messaging system is quickly replacing email altogether for many people, especially teens and twenty-somethings. Facebook Messages essentially combine email, text and chat into one place by offering real-time threaded conversations that can be sent and accessed across a range of devices, including phones. Even people who aren’t on Facebook can communicate through Facebook Messages by sending email to your own personal Facebook email address, which has recently been foisted upon you whether you like it or not.

Postcards

Who says you can only send postcards when traveling? If you’ve just got a short message that you don’t mind being seen by various mail carriers and processors across the country, jot it down on a postcard. Stationery stores are packed with pretty postcards and note cards, and hunting down just the right one for your recipient is half the fun.

Postagram

No need to go through the trouble of finding a place to print out your photos while you’re on vacation, or even hunt for the perfect postcards so you can send them to loved ones back home. An app called Postagram turns any of your Instagram photos into a postcard and sends them to the addresses of your choice for just 99 cents. It’s even more personal than choosing a pre-made image, putting your own unique spin on the sights you’re seeing.

Dictation Apps

There’s a time and a place for writing email, and the driver’s seat is not among them. While multi-tasking and driving is probably never the greatest idea, you can fit in a few extra tasks using one of the many dictation apps available for smartphones. Dragon Dictation is one popular choice. You simply speak your message into your phone, and the app turns it into text that you can send via email or any other communication service you like. GoogleVoice, which offers basic call/text/voicemail services, has similar capabilities. You can even set it up to take a call from your cell number, transcribe your message and store it in your Gmail.

Video chat

Maybe it’s not correspondence in the conventional sense, but if your messages don’t contain specific instructions or anything that would need to be written down, video chat is a great alternative to email. It gives back all of those irreplaceable face-to-face signals that you’re missing in text, like tone of voice and body language.

Surprise Packages

The only thing that’s better than receiving a hand-written letter in the mail is finding a package on your doorstep, marked with the return address of somebody you love. And sometimes, “just because” gifts are better than birthday gifts, simply because they’re totally unexpected. Send something meaningful along with that letter. But don’t forget the letter.

Twitter Direct Messages

The fact that you’re limited to 140 characters per tweet is what makes Twitter work the way it does: you’re forced to condense your communications down to the absolute basics. The same goes for direct messages, or DMs, sent to other Twitter users. Twitter DMs can be another quick and efficient way to get across a small amount of info. The only limitation, aside from the fact that you can’t be sure your intended recipient is actually checking them, is that DMs can only be sent between users that follow each other.

Google+ Hangouts

Get up to 10 people together to talk business or just catch up using Google+ Hangouts. This group video chat service replaces Google’s 1:1 video chat, Google Talk, and was recently integrated right into Gmail. The catch? You’ve got to have a Google+ account. It’s a pretty nice feature that Facebook has yet to offer, and there’s no harm in signing up for Google+ just to use Hangouts.

Three.sentenc.es

Take the short-is-better spirit of Twitter and apply it to email by limiting yourself to just three sentences. A service called Three.sentenc.es cuts out all the unnecessary information and pleasantries that normally accompany an email, saving time for both sender and recipient. Like Twitter DMs, it forces you to keep your message short. While you could argue that this terse style of communication could lead to dumbed-down language and social blunders, three-sentence emails could certainly help you avoid an intimidating pile-up of unread messages in your inbox.

Yammer

For in-house business communications, email can be a pretty inelegant and inefficient solution. Enter services like Yammer and Chatter, which aim to bring conversations, content and business data into one place where everything is updated in real time. Essentially, they’re like a private Twitter or Facebook for companies. Accessible through the web, mobile phones or desktop applications, these services are essentially virtual offices that replace email altogether for many companies.

DropBox

If you need to send large attachments, email definitely isn’t the best way to go. First of all, it’s slow, and has a fairly small maximum file size. But more importantly, it’s not secure. DropBox is just one of many services that enables quick and easy file transfers from one device to another, and from one user to another.

GoogleDocs

Hopefully you’re not still emailing documents with multiple contributors and/or editors between a group of people, dealing with all of the headaches that come with multiple versions of the same document. This practice has gone the way of newsgroups and AOL chat rooms. Use GoogleDocs instead, where you can create, share and collaborate on documents, which are stored online for easy access from anywhere in the world.

Photos: MartinaK15, postagram, thomcochrane

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There are a lot of people my age who yammer on endlessly about the demise of snail mail. These people love to wax nostalgic about the superiority of old-timey letters written on paper –  as if the simple act of using a Bic ballpoint automatically imbues writers with the eloquence of Charlotte Bronte. I could not disagree more, but I happen to love email – it’s fast and practical and also paper-free, which is good news for the rain forests.

And email is better than ever now, thanks to a new program that lets you know if your email message is projecting a negative tone. This program will alert users if their emails sound angry, insulting or unfriendly. There are those who will object to this software, and rail against it as censorship or corporate control, or some such nonsense. But I think it’s a great idea. Writing is hard and people need all the help they can get – if using this software means you’ll antagonize fewer friends and colleagues, then what’s the harm?  Similar software has been developed to detect sarcasm in outgoing emails; again, this is terrific, but why stop there? I think technology should help us all it can – the following are other ways computers should be rigged to save us from ourselves:

• If you are over the age of twelve and you attempt to make a smiley-face emoticon out of punctuation marks, your computer should seize up and turn itself off in protest. The same holds true if you try to forward a video of cats playing the piano.
• If you are bragging endlessly about your kids, your job, or your beachfront property, a scolding message should appear on the screen, warning you that no one wants to hear it.
• If you are breaking up with someone via email, your computer should sadly inform you that you are simply not fit to live.
• When you’ve wasted an entire day playing Solitaire or Googling people from high school, a pop-up image should appear on your screen, sternly advising you to get a life.
• Computers should come equipped with some sort of virtual sodium pentothal that prevents people from blatantly misrepresenting themselves on eharmony, Match.com and other dating websites.
• If you are married and you try to contact an old boyfriend on Facebook, an ominous stick-figure of someone playing with fire should appear and warn you that you’re about to ruin your life.
• If you attempt to forward an email chain letter, a hand should reach out from your keyboard and bitch-slap you till you come to your senses. If the letter warns that breaking the chain will result in bad luck, illness or monetary loss, the computer should deliver a quick but intensely painful electric shock.
• On the other hand, I think all email providers should embed in every single email message this video by comedian Merril Markoe. It is a two minute clip (which is entirely in French for no good reason) and shows Markoe faking a heart attack while her dogs look on, sweetly and stupidly oblivious, happily depositing chew toys on her limp and lifeless body. The video is goofy and subversively warmhearted, and if everyone watched it several times every day, the world would be a happier place. Now that computers rule the world, they should be obligated to spread cheer wherever they can. Really, it’s the least they can do.

Editor’s Note: Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Image: Ed Yourdon

The post The Goldberg Variations: Big Brother Is Watching You Type appeared first on EcoSalon.

Finland’s new mail program hopes to cut costs and decrease pollution.

According to the Telegraph, a new system launched in Finland may have snail mail sliding even further from our fingertips. On April 12, Itella, which runs the country’s postal system, will begin a pilot program in which mail is scanned, digitized, and then emailed to recipients. Once in action, it is anticipated that this plan will reduce carbon emissions, paper waste and cut costs by limiting the number of mail carriers on the road.

So far, 126 households and 20 businesses have volunteered to take part in the project. Once mail is scanned, participants receive a text message or email that their mail is ready to view. Some skeptics are worried about privacy issues and have likened this new mail system to tactics used by the KGB. But advocates of the program insist that mail is not read nor is it kept once it has been copied. When it comes to security, Itella’s director, Tommy Tikka, compares the approach not to e-mail but to web banking, insisting the program is safe and secure.

But what about things that can’t be scanned? Replacement credit cards, the feel of embossed fonts, the smell of perfume-scented love letters? For this trial, hard copies of scanned mail (including any additional non-scannable pieces) will still be delivered twice weekly to homes and offices. It’s unclear as to whether this will continue on a regular basis after the trial period has concluded. The trial will run through the end of the year, and if the feedback is positive, the result will be a more widespread program.

With America appearing to move towards cutting Saturday mail deliveries, will this new mail system be next for us, too? Here’s hoping!

But, in the meantime, if you want to eliminate your junk mail right now, check out Tonic’s own Precycle!

Editor’s note: Article by Sophie Rosenblum. Originally published by our friends at Tonic.com. Tonic is a digital media company and news source dedicated to promoting the good that happens each day around the world. Tonic tells the stories of people and organizations who are working to make a difference, by inspiring good in themselves and others. Be sure to visit them and say hi, and follow Tonic on Twitter, too!

Image: uzvards

The post Want to Save the Planet? Have Your (Snail) Mail Scanned appeared first on EcoSalon.

I like life’s special little surprises: a dozen roses mysteriously appearing at the doorstep, some birds nesting right outside the living room window or a phone call from an old friend I’ve been thinking about all week.

But there’s one thing I don’t like to be surprised by: my period. This is something I want to have planned out with the right, comfortable clothes and all my supplies at hand in the secret pocket of my purse. A camping trip, the third date, that beach vacation – not exactly welcome times for that time.

Thanks to My Monthly Cycles, I’ve been keeping track using an online calendar that averages out the lengths of my previous cycles and gives me approximate dates for both my next period and my next ovulation.

And best of all for busy gals like us, you can adjust your account settings to send you email alerts a few days before your next period or ovulation is about to start. It’s like the Google Alert of periods! Now if they just had an iPhone app…

Image: ePublicist

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