Get a Gmail profile picture

Wonder how some of your colleagues have added their picture so it shows up automatically when they e-mail you?  You can do it, too!

Open your e-mail, and click the small Gear icon in the upper right corner, then choose settings

On the general tab, scroll down about half way, and find "My Picture"

Click the link that says "Select a Picture"



Click the button that says "Choose File", then browse and find a picture of yourself

Drag the crop box to pick what part of the picture shows up, then click "apply changes"

Scroll down and click Save

Google bar change

Tech Support staff person Sean provides this article for our blog about the change in gmail where the black bar has disappeared.

You may have notice something missing recently when logging into Gmail, the black bar at the top of the screen where the different Google app links where.  Google replaced this with an icon, “Google Grid Navigation”, which is next to your email address on the top right side of the menu.

Clicking on this icon will now will let you select your most common used Google apps like Google Drive, Google Sites, and Google Calendar.

Exporting students from WESPaC Gradebook to make contacts in Gmail

You can generate a list of e-mail addresses for each of your student sections, that you can cut/paste into your contacts in e-mail.

Go into WESPaC

Click Teacher Access, then My Gradebook

 Click the Secondary Gradebook link for the first section you want to work with

Open the Reports Menu, and choose "Class Roster" from the list

Choose Email from the list, and click "Export to Excel"

The student e-mail column is the one you want.  Copy and paste it into gmail, and you can create a group with it as follows:

Click the mail menu in the upper left corner of Gmail

Click Contacts

Click New Group in the sidebar

Name it after the section of the grade book you chose in the steps above

Click the add people button after clicking the name of the group in the sidebar

Click Paste, and it should add the students to your e-mail list

Slow Gmail on Safari/Mac

An end user was complaining of slowness in Gmail using Safari on the Mac.  After taking a look around, quitting and re-opening, and trying a couple items found online, I noticed that there were a number of tabs open in another browser window.

It turned out that the re-open tabs on startup was causing him to end up with Gmail open in more than a dozen tabs at a time.  In addition, he was moving between Google Drive, Calendar, and Gmail using the black bar at the top of the screen rather than cycling between browser windows to find the one that was already open, which was opening additional windows.  With each window he opened, Gmail got even slower.

The solution was to close any extra Gmail windows in the background, and help the user use the "Window" menu to find Gmail rather than re-opening it each time he wanted it open.  I also disabled the "reopen windows at login" to keep it from starting up with more than a dozen instances each time after he shuts down.

Block e-mail as junk messages

One of our staff people had a large volume of unsolicited e-mail, or junk e-mail, coming into her account.  She was disconcerted by the e-mails, which were coming in at a pretty high rate over a couple weeks.

How to teach your google e-mail to treat messages as junk:

Please use the junk e-mail option to "teach" your e-mail that these are junk mail

It looks like a small stop octagon with an exclamation point in it. (see attached picture)

If you teach it that a few of them are junk e-mail, it'll start hiding them from you.

Tips and Shortcuts for Web Based E-mail

Google's Gmail web interface has a lot of hidden features and shortcut keys that you can use.  To view a list of these, please download this .pdf document.  One really handy one is hitting tab, then space bar or enter to send a message.

http://2136722317829374289-a-googleapps-com-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/googleapps.com/deploy-google-apps/Home/resources-user-adoption/quick-reference/Google_Mail_Shortcuts.pdf

Printing from the new e-mail system

When you're viewing an e-mail in the new e-mail system, you can print it by clicking the little "print" icon which looks like a printer, which is in the upper right corner of the e-mail you're viewing.  

If the message is part of a thread of messages, and you only want to print one of them, you can click the small down arrow next to the header info to the right of the the sender/recipient info, and choose "Print".  

If you scroll to the top of the thread of messages, the small print icon pictured above will be at the top of the entire thread.  Clicking it will print all of the messages in the thread of messages.

E-mail Search Doesn't Show Items from the Trash

If you search for a message, and don't see a result for it, you may have deleted it. By default, the search feature of the web-based e-mail doesn't show messages that match your criteria which are in the Trash.

You can override this after you perform a search by scrolling to the bottom of the results, and then click the link in "Deleted messages match your Search. Show them."

Here's a screen shot:

Finding e-mail that you've "archived" in the new mail system

If you're looking to find out how to retrieve messages that you've "archived" in the new washougalsd.org e-mail domain, you can do this:

Hover your mouse above the list of labels/folders in the left side bar of the e-mail system
Click on "More" at the bottom
Choose the "All Mail" folder

This will show all messages from any folder in your mailbox.