Whenever you get an email that requires an action, select the “More” button from the menu in reading view. From the drop-down list, select “Add to Tasks.” A Google Task to do list will pop up at the bottom of your screen. Edit the to-do list, and set deadlines to help make your work flow more efficient

If you shop using eBay or PayPal, prevent against spam or identity theft by enabling the authentication icon for verified senders. Go to “Labs” and enable “Authentication Icon for Verified Senders.” Gmail will place a key icon next to a sender’s name, signaling the email you are receiving is legitimate.

To speed up your brain’s ability to recognize and select the emails you need, create Labels for your Gmail messages and then set a different color for each label. Once your business emails are labelled in red, your friends and family’s messages in green and your financial transaction receipts in blue, for example, it’ll be much easier to scan your inbox visually and find what you’re looking for.

One lesser-known fact about Gmail is that when someone sends an email to you, it doesn’t matter what periods or plus symbols are added to your name, they are sent to the same original email address. This is best illustrated in the photo above. You may feel that this doesn’t matter, the chances are low that someone will accidentally add a period or plus sign to my name when emailing me.

However, that’s not the point. This hack is useful in allowing you to curtail emails you receive based on the address you give out. Going to a website where sign-up requiring your email, but you could care less about what they have to send you, you can use “username+junk@gmail.com”. Going to a corporate meet-and-greet and want an easy place to access emails from individuals you meet? Give everyone you meet the email “username+meetandgreet@gmail.com”. However, this alone isn’t what is productive. What is productive is creating a filter for each email address you give out, allowing messages to be sent to the folders for easier retrieval and organization. Gmail hack source:

You may not know, but there are now email-tracking tools that make it easy for people to see when you open an email, what you click, and where you're located. To fight these, the Ugly Email Chrome extension (on Firefox soon) shows you when your emails in Gmail are being tracked. And it starts working before you click anything. Once Ugly Email is installed, a tiny little eye symbol appears next to any email in your inbox that's being tracked.

A Chrome extension called Full Contact lets you see the social profiles and job titles of everyone who sends you emails. You can read through their tweets, check out their Instagram photos, and browse their Facebook updates. You can even get detailed information on their organizations — like location, size, and demographics.

Full Contact works with Google Calendar as well, in case you want to brush up before a meeting.

Snapmail is a Chrome extension that adds a button next to Gmail's "send" button that you can use to send self-destructing messages. The button encrypts your message and only sends someone a link to it. Once your recipient follows the link to the message, Snapmail informs the person that it will self-destruct in 60 seconds. And then it does. Right now, Snapmail encrypts only text content. A great way to send sensitive information such as passwords, bank information etc.

Giphy, the world's premier GIF-searching company, has a Chrome extension that puts the power of GIFs straight into your Gmail. If you install the extension, a little rainbow Giphy icon will pop up near your normal formatting icons. This button will let you insert GIFs into your emails to your heart's content.

Find Big Mail searches for all the huge emails eating up your space and deletes them

If you find you are getting low on space in your Gmail, it's probably because you have a bunch of emails with big attachments cluttering up your inbox. Find Big Mail is a program that scans your account and helps you find the largest files in your inbox. Then it helps you delete them. Poof. In a second, you can cut down the size of your inbox by an insane amount.

WiseStamp is a Chrome extension that helps you customize your signature. You can choose fonts, size, color, and images — but you can also add in more exotic elements, like RSS feeds, and social services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Through the program called Unroll.me, you are able to keep track of the email newsletters and subscriptions that are filling up your inbox. Through this program, you receive a “Rollup” that acts as a newsletter in and of itself, showing in one email all of the subscription emails you receive. Along with being able to view what needs to be viewed and get it out of the way, Unroll.me is also a great program to easily get rid of the junk subscriptions you may have but found too difficult to get rid of.

This is another way to be sure that the mail you send is secure.Most of us are aware of just how much our information is vulnerable online. Someone gaining access to our personal information can wreak all sorts of havoc, used it to stalk us or just keep tabs on us. If you have an issue with outsiders getting hold of your personal information – be it rival companies, the government or hackers up to no good – then SecureGmail is an excellent little tool for you. You can quickly install it and use it to send encrypted emails. Even Google servers will only see the encrypted version of the text. Only the person who the email was intended for can decrypt the message using a password that you have agreed on. Of course you should make it a complex password and share it with the recipient through means other than email.

Being more productive often comes down to quickly and efficiently searching your inbox for important emails and back-and-forth conversation that hide important bits of information. You know they are there somewhere – you just need to get to them. CloudMagic provides a fast an effective email search as you type function that allows you to preview email conversation, prioritize the most important ones and even receive follow-up reminders. It is unobtrusive, nestled in the upper right corner of the page, and keeps your search results open as you click through your inbox or compose new messages, allowing you crosscheck and share information more efficiently. You can even search information from a number of different accounts.

For those looking for a good way to manage multiple email accounts, Checker Plus is a Chrome extension that is a blessing! . It allows you to label and monitor important emails, get notifications with user photos and can even be set up to read your emails out loud to you if you are busy. You can run it independent of your browser and get new email alerts even if it is closed. There are a number of additional useful features and the developer offers excellent customer support and regular updates.

Most of us have multiple email accounts: your work address and at least one, if not several, personal ones. Instead of logging in to each account individually, you can send messages from any of them through Gmail.

You’ll first have to set up your alternate email addresses in Gmail. Google provides detailed steps for adding external addresses and domain and email aliases. Once they’re added, just click the From field when you’re composing, forwarding, or replying to an email. Then click the drop-down menu to the right of the field and select the address from which you want to send the message.