One very important note to Gmail users: Gmail’s “Forward” function only forwards plain text. While this doesn’t affect most messages, this behavior can mangle HTML-formatted messages, dropping important formatting, images, and data. Read on for more information…

If you receive a message that has fancy formatting and/or includes inline graphics, when you click on Forward, Gmail strips out all the formatting and forwards only the plain text. This is very apparant with email originating from online services like AOL and with clients like Outlook. For example, I received an email from my parents’ AOL account that contained an inline graphic image. I could view it just fine in Gmail, but when I tried to forward it to my wife’s email account, it dropped the image and only forwarded the plain text. Yes, I could save the image and then attach it to the forward, but it’s a kludgy workaround and not very intuitive to “casual” users. (Note that if you receive an image as an attachment, Gmail DOES handle forwarding properly.)

Theoretically, Gmail could fix this by adding a “Forward as Attachment” option in addition to the standard Forward links. I have emailed Gmail Support about this issue.

Finally, note that while this behavior is not exclusive to Gmail, I feel it’s important enough to let people know. In my opinion, this is the one “feature” that prevents me from sending invitations to family and friends who are not computer savvy.

I covered this partially in another tip, but I feel it is important to repeat it. One of Gmail’s excellent features is its “Conversations”. Conversations conveniently organize related messages, but this can be potentially dangerous if you don’t understand how to manage both conversations and individual messages. If you aren’t paying attention, you can inadvertently Trash an entire conversation instead of just a single message.

First off, you need to determine if the message is a single message or part of a conversation. While viewing a list of messages (for example, “Inbox”) look in the first column on the left of the message listing. A conversation is indicated by some number in parenthesis ie: “(3)” next to Sender’s name. The number represents the number of messages associated with this conversation. If you click the checkbox in front of the message and select an action, (ie: “Move to Trash”, “Mark as Read”, “Delete Forever”, “Report as Spam”, etc.) the action will affect ALL messages in that conversation. If it is not a conversation, then it will only affect the selected message.

If you want to affect only a single message within a conversation, you must first open the message to view it and then click on the “More Options” link while viewing the message. This allows you to take specific actions on the open message within the conversation.

Conversations are very convenient and powerful, but actually dealing with them can be confusing at times.