The Way Of Gmail

The Way Of Gmail

has been a wonderful resource for any and all questions or problems that come up while we use it. If you’re not using Gmail, you’re missing out on an amazing new tool, which has been incredibly well-designed and constantly getting better and better.

Thanks to the folks at Google, we are now able to manage our email much like a software developer handles the code that keeps their program running. Gmail, at its core, is an incredibly clever piece of software. Gmail’s ability to route messages, delete messages, and perform many other functions are all immensely powerful when used correctly.

The problem is that the Gmail user interface is very hard to use. The toolbar is cluttered with tons of little icons and buttons, all of which are easily missed. And because the Gmail toolbar buttons and icons tend to take up screen space, messages have to be optimized in order to fit into your interface. This is both annoying and unsafe, since it makes it easy for one message to be displayed in one place while another is hidden in a background window.

So, how do we make the Gmail interface as fast and easy to use as possible? Here’s my suggestion:

Change the Search Toolbar to the Application Toolbar

On our project, we’ve gotten a lot of practice writing email clients. We love our clients because they are just awesome. What other email service provider lets you manage your accounts from a web browser? That’s a big deal.

The Gmail interface is actually pretty easy to master. It’s so well designed and easy to navigate that I don’t think there’s a better solution out there. After reading this guide, you should have no trouble writing your first Gmail email.

One of the biggest questions we have, as you can see by the title of this section, is: “How can I translate an email address?” The answer to that question is: “You can’t”. Google does not support translating an email address to a phone number, to an Instagram handle, or even to a name if you feel like it. The closest you will get to a translation is a name at the end of an email address. This answer is basically wrong, because there are other methods to add the name of an email address to a contact list. What we are going to be doing today is going to learn about these methods. If you’ve already done this, then go ahead and just skip to the end.

Google Apps Script (or GAS for short) is a bit of an esoteric world in the internet community, but it has some incredible advantages over others in the realm of email services. For example, your data is hosted on Google servers, and you can even create auto-generated forms that auto-complete as you type.

Let’s get to it.

You can follow this link to learn more about Google Apps Script.

By the way, if you’re like me and you have been itching to break out the C# for some Visual Basic .NET coding, you should definitely check out this book. I’m still learning C# so I can’t really vouch for the quality of the book, but I have read a few chapters of it and have to say it is amazing. I’ve found that it is helping me to better understand the structure and workflow of .NET programming. I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Since you’re already on Google Apps Script, here is an example of the script you need to create:

The gist of this code is that it will look up the person’s phone number, and then put a phone number that you have typed into Gmail into the context (as opposed to inserting the phone number manually).

The “Social Log-in” Method

For those of you who want a bit more customization, there is another method for writing an email that Google does allow.

It is actually called a social log-in, and has been around for a while. I have never used it, and I’m not really sure why you would want to, but I would assume that most of the emails you write are to businesses and large organizations.

If you use this method, you won’t be able to send an email to a single person.