How to configure your settings in Gmail

In this tutorial, you will learn a little bit about Gmail’s Settings area. If you’ve watched any of the previous demos, you’ve probably seen this area already.

It can be found via the Settings link at the top of every page.

First up is the General tab. This tab contains various settings that control the way Gmail operates.

You can change your Gmail display language using this drop-down menu.

For more language settings, click the Show all language options link.

Here, you can enable Transliteration and support for right-to-left editing.

Next on this tab is the Maximum page size option. The default setting is to show 50 conversations per page.

Let’s change that to 100.

Keyboard shortcuts can help you save time, but they may not work with certain kinds of keyboards.

If you prefer to always connect to Gmail securely, set the Browser connection option to Always use https.

If you want to enter a Signature to append to every message, first click this radio button.

Then type your signature here.

Setting a Vacation responder may be useful if you’re not going to be able to sign in to Gmail for a while. Gmail will send an automated reply to all incoming messages using the Subject and Message you specify here.

When finished here, click Save Changes.

Your Gmail session may need to be restarted, depending on the settings you changed.

Return to the Settings page.

This time, go to Accounts and Import.

We’ve covered much of this page in previous tutorials. Import mail and contacts was covered several tutorials ago, while Send mail as was described in the tutorial directly before the one you’re watching now.

Check mail using POP3 allows you to configure Gmail to check your other mail accounts for mail on a regular basis. New mail will appear automatically in Gmail.

Here, you can also Add additional storage to Gmail. This does cost money, however.

We showed how to change your Google Account settings in the previous tutorial, as well.

The Labels and Filters tabs were covered in previous tutorials, while Forwarding and POP/IMAP, Chat, and Themes will be covered later.

Let’s go to the Web Clips tab.

The Web Clips feature shows Google Sponsored Links, Gmail tips, and custom content at the top of most pages.

It’s enabled by default. Click this checkbox to disable Web Clips.

Now, on to Labs.

Gmail Labs contains experimental features that aren’t quite ready for everyone to use. Features listed here may change, break, or disappear at any time. You can try anything you want here, but remember that it’s at your own risk.

Take note of this link. If you try a Labs feature and have trouble accessing your Inbox, this will disable all Labs features.

This is the end of the tutorial. You now have a good idea what many of the Gmail Settings do, and how to customize them.