Posted by Joyce Sohn, Product Marketing Manager

It’s that time of year when students are graduating, and in many cases getting yet another email address to check — an alumni account — as a graduation present.

Whether you have an alumni address, a work account, or your own domain that you like to use, rather than logging in and out of multiple accounts, you can set yourself up so all your mail ends up in your Gmail inbox. And you can send mail from any of the other addresses you own right from Gmail as well.

There are two steps to make this happen:

1. Set up mail forwarding or fetching
Many email providers offer free auto-forwarding to other accounts. Log into your non-Gmail account and set your Gmail address as the forwarding target. If your other account doesn’t offer forwarding but supports POP3 access, you can use Mail Fetcher in Gmail to automatically check your other account for new mail and download it to Gmail.

2. Set up custom “From:”
Gmail’s custom “From:” feature lets you send mail with one of your other email addresses listed as the sender in place of your Gmail address. There’s a good step-by-step for how to set this up in the Help Center, but the basics are adding the address you want to use and then verifying that it belongs to you. Once you have your custom “From:” set up, you can pick which address you want to reply from in the “From:” address drop down while composing messages.

P.S. If you’re a recent grad and want more tips on how to use Google during this transition period, check out the Google for Students Blog, where we’ll be posting more tips like this weekly for the next couple months.

See more here: 
Tip: Check and reply from multiple email addresses in Gmail

Posted by Corey Anderson, Software Engineer (and puzzle creator)

Flying 500 miles per hour at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, it always seemed odd that I could use approved electronic devices, but I couldn’t get online to chat or send an email. Luckily, the Wright brothers have been catching up with the cloud, and airlines like Virgin America have rolled out in-flight WiFi across their fleet.

To celebrate, we’ve teamed up with Virgin America to provide complimentary WiFi on all flights on June 24th, and we’re co-hosting a timed online scavenger hunt called the Day in the Cloud Challenge. Whether you’re going to be in the air or on the ground on that day, you’re invited to participate in the challenge and can sign up at www.dayinthecloud.com.

If you use Gmail, there’s a good chance you already have a leg up because some of the questions will involve your knowledge of Gmail (plus, you’ll need a Google Account to play). To give you a little practice, we’ve just revealed some practice questions.

Curious how some people are getting ready for the challenge? Check out this video:

Read more: 
Like puzzles? Get ready for the Day in the Cloud Challenge on June 24th

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

My friends email me all the time with ideas for improving Gmail. Just this weekend, my friend Dave said he wanted a way to select all of his messages with a certain label (like “urgent”). Two weeks ago, Adam came up with the idea of a button that would filter his inbox to only show unread items. Good ideas, but it turns out that doing stuff like this (and much more) is already possible using search operators.

For example, Dave would just need to search for “in:urgent” to get all items labeled “urgent,” and Adam would just search for “is:unread in:inbox” to see all the unread messages in his inbox.

Here are a few other useful ways to filter your inbox:

• “to:me is:starred” shows all messages sent directly to you that are starred
• “is:chat from:heather” shows all chat conversations you had with Heather
• “is:starred -in:inbox” shows all your starred messages that aren’t in your inbox (a good way to find anything important that you might have accidentally archived)
• “from:elliot filename:pdf” shows all messages from Elliot that have a pdf attachment

We’ve written about search operators here before, but lots of people find them hard to remember. That’s why we built Search Autocomplete in Gmail Labs, designed to make searching in Gmail much easier. Instead of having to remember the exact syntax for advanced searches, you can just start typing, and search autocomplete will help you fill in the rest. If you find yourself doing some of the same searches over and over again, consider creating a permanent link to them using Quick Links in Labs.

Update (6/10): Revised the example about searching for a label to use “urgent” instead of “important.”

See the original post:
Tip: Slice and dice your mail with search operators

Posted by Peter Balsiger, Software Engineer

Whenever I open up my inbox at work, I’m never surprised to find several new messages waiting to be read. The same thing can’t always be said about my personal Gmail account. Sometimes I end up checking my mail only to find nothing new there.

No big deal, really. But now imagine that you access Gmail on a super slow connection from a remote place in Ethopia where it might take minutes to completely load your inbox. The disappointment is larger when you find out that there is nothing new to read and you could have saved all that time.

To ease this pain a bit, we created a new feature in Gmail Labs called Inbox Preview. While Gmail is loading, a simple, static preview of your inbox with your ten most recent messages is displayed. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and if you’re on a slow connection you’ll know from the start if it’s worth the wait.

See original here: 
New in Labs: Inbox preview