General Tab in Gmail Settings

Video Transcript

"So now I am going to go into some of the Gmail settings and you can access the settings by going along the top, up here to the right, clicking on "Settings". It will bring up your settings and by default the "General" tab comes up and I will talk about that one first. First, you have your "language" and you can select from many different languages. Then next is the inbox "Maximum page size", which means how many messages are you going to see in your inbox at a time. Say it is on fifty and you have more than fifty, then you will have one or more pages that you will have to flip through to go through your entire inbox. So you can set that to twenty-five, fifty or one hundred right now. "Keyboard shortcuts", I will talk to you more about the "keyboard shortcuts" later, but you can turn them on or off depending on your preference. Here is the "Picture" option and you actually have the option to select a picture of yourself or whatever you want. Then when you send a message to another Gmail user, when they scroll over your name, the picture would actually come up right here and they can see it. You can also add pictures for your other friends, if you happen to have a picture of them, that you want to add for them. Speaking of pictures like that you can show all pictures, that maybe your friends selected or you could only show pictures that you selected, just like I said I can select them from my own contacts. Then you have your "Signature" option and to enable that you would click right here and then type in an email signature for whatever you want. It will add it to the end of all outgoing messages. As of right now, you can not enter any HTML mail in there, but that could change. The next setting is "Personal level indicators", so you have the option for "no indicators" or you can show them and what it will do, is it will display a single arrow by messages sent to my address, not a mailing address, a double arrow by messages only sent to me. So if I click to "Show indicators", I will show you what it does, when I click to "save" that, or change that I need to save it first, down here. Now you can see I have those little arrows down here. I am going back into the settings; I can turn the indicators "off". The next option is "Snippets", and what the "snippet" is in the inbox, it shows just a little bit of the what is in the message. You see right here, this is the "subject line" and then this is the "Snippet", it just shows you a little bit of the message, as like as much as they can show. You can turn that "on" or "off", it is kind of your preference, I like it on. The next option is "Vacation responder" and when you turn this on, just like it sounds, if you go on vacation, you can turn it on and then it will automatically respond to everybody that sends you an email, with a message of whatever you want to write, something like, "Hey I am on vacation". So if you need to use that, you can turn it on in your "General" tab. Then the last setting is the "Outgoing message encoding", according to Google's help center, each time you send a message, Gmail automatically selects an appropriating coding for the language in which you have composed your mail. It is possible however, the recipient may not be able to properly view the message you have sent, so if you are having problems with people viewing messages you have sent and most likely that is because your using different languages, in your display language here your writing a different language. Then you might consider switching on the "Unicode". By default this setting should work for most people. So that is the "General" tab of the settings in Gmail."