MANAGE YOUR EMAILS BETTER
Control your email notifications
You need to set a balance between receiving messages in a timely manner and not being constantly disturbed by alerts. Both Outlook and Thunderbird let you specify how often they check for new emails.
In Outlook, do this by clicking ‘Send/ Receive’ on the ribbon toolbar, followed by ‘Send/receive Groups’. Select ‘Define Send/receive Groups’ in the menu, then change the number of minutes beside ‘Schedule an automatic send/receive every’. You can also untick the box to the left of this line and instead press F9 every time you want to check for new emails. To change how Outlook notifies you of new messages, click File followed by Options, then click Mail in the sidebar of the box that appears. Scroll down to ‘Message arrival’ and tick/untick the boxes beside the various notification options, including playing a sound, temporarily changing your cursor and displaying an icon.
In Thunderbird, press Alt+t to open the Tools menu, then click Account Settings. Click ‘Server Settings’ in the sidebar of the box that appears, and change the number of minutes beside ‘Check for new messages every’, or untick the box to the left of this to turn off automatic updates. After doing this you can press Shift+f5 every time you want to check for new emails. To manage notifications, open Options in the Tools menu and click General in the sidebar, then tick/untick the boxes beside ‘Show an alert’, ‘Show a tray icon’ and ‘Play a sound’.
As Gmail works through a browser, it constantly displays an updated view of your inbox. However, you can still control how it notifies you when it receives a new message. Click the cog icon, followed by ‘See all settings’, then scroll down to ‘Desktop notifications’. Click ‘Important mail notifications on’ or ‘New mail notifications on’, then click the ‘Click here to enable desktop notifications for Gmail’ link. An alert pops up from the address bar prompting you to Allow or Block notifications - click Allow (see screenshot at the top of the page).
Protect yourself against email spammers
Previewing emails as they arrive is a quick and easy way to prioritise messages in your inbox, allowing you to delete junk before focusing on what matters. Beware, however. Depending on how your email is set up, if you preview a spam email any images in it may be downloaded from the spammer’s server, which flags up your email account as active and genuine (and therefore a target for more spam). To prevent this, we recommend turning off automatic image downloads before using your email’s preview option.
In Outlook, automatic image downloads are disabled by default. Make sure of this by clicking File followed by Options, then clicking Trust Center in the sidebar. Click ‘Trust Center Settings…’ and make sure the box beside ‘Don’t download pictures automatically…’ is ticked (see screenshot above). You can then enable the preview pane by closing the settings window and returning to the main Outlook window, switching to the View tab and choosing one of the options from the dropdown menu that opens when you click the Reading Pane button.
In Thunderbird, press Alt+t to open the Tools menu, then click Options. Click ‘Privacy’ in the sidebar and make sure the box beside ‘Allow remote content in messages’ is unticked. Now close the Options window and use F8 to show/ hide the preview pane.
In Gmail, click the cog icon followed by ‘See all Settings’, then click the button beside ‘Ask before displaying external images’ on the General tab. Now switch to the Inbox tab and tick the box beside ‘Enable reading pane’. Save your changes and return to your inbox, then use the ‘Toggle split pane mode’ button above your message list to show/hide the preview pane.
Choose when to mark new emails as read
Specifying what constitutes an unread or read email when using a preview pane can save you a lot of time when working through a crammed inbox. Often you only need a brief glance at an email to know it’s of no interest, in which case it can be marked as read.
To do this in Outlook, click File followed by Options, then click Mail in the sidebar. Scroll down to ‘Outlook panes’ and click ‘Reading Pane…’, then tick the box beside ‘Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane’. By default, the message needs to be displayed for at least five seconds before it’s marked as read, but you can change this duration in the box below.
In Thunderbird press Alt+t and click Options, then switch to Display in the sidebar and click the Advanced tab. Tick the box beside ‘Automatically mark messages as read’ and use the ‘Immediately on display’ or ‘After displaying for’ options on the lines below to set how long it takes to change the message status (see screenshot below).
In Gmail, the option to mark messages as read automatically is hidden unless you’ve enabled the preview pane by following the instructions above. Once you’ve done so, return to the Settings window and click the General tab, then scroll down to Preview Pane. Here, you’ll find the option to ‘Mark a conversation as read’ with the delay set to three seconds. To change this, select an alternative duration in the dropdown menu.
In all three services, you can quickly mark emails as read or unread using keyboard shortcuts – see these (and more shortcuts) on page 57.
Delay and schedule the sending of emails
How often have you clicked Send, only to realise you’ve spelt the recipient’s name wrong at the start of your email? Delaying your email’s dispatch for a few seconds gives you enough time to open it again and get it right.
To disable instant sending in Gmail, open its settings and, on the General tab, specify how many seconds grace you need by selecting a duration in the dropdown menu beside Undo Send.
You can also choose precisely when you want the email to be sent (useful if you’re emailing late at night and want it to arrive in the recipient’s inbox at a more civilised time). Rather than clicking the blue Send button, click the down arrow on the right-hand side and click ‘Schedule send’. Next, click one of the three suggested send times, or click ‘Select date and time’ and set the precise delivery time and date yourself (see screenshot below).
Thunderbird doesn’t have a dedicated delay-sending tool, but you can achieve a similar result by pressing Ctrl+shift+enter rather than clicking Send. This stores it in the Outbox, from which you can send it by clicking Send Unsent Messages in the File menu.
If you want to schedule an email for a specific time, use the Send Later add-on. Press Alt+t, click Options, then click ‘Extensions & themes’ at the bottom of the sidebar, followed by Extensions (top left). Type send later in the search box and, beside Send Later in the list of results, click ‘Add to Thunderbird’. Click ‘Add’, then ‘Restart now’ in the boxes that drop down from the top of the window. Now, when you press Ctrl+shift+enter to send an email, you’ll see a list of options to set a specific time and date for sending.
In Outlook, you can set up delayed delivery as the default option, but it takes a little more work. Click ‘File’, followed by ‘Manage Rules & Alerts’. Next, click ‘New Rule’ followed by ‘Apply rule on messages I send’. Click ‘Next’ twice, then Yes, to confirm that you want to apply the rule to every message you send. Click in the box beside ‘defer delivery by a number of minutes’, then click ‘a number of’ in the box below.
By default, your messages will be delayed by one minute, but you can increase this up to two hours by typing into the box that appears (we opted for five minutes – see screenshot above). Click ‘OK’, then Next twice and type delay sending into the ‘Specify a name for this rule’ box and tick the box beside ‘Create this rule on all accounts’. Make sure the box beside ‘Turn on this rule’ is ticked, then click Finish.
If you just want to delay the delivery of a single message by sending it at a specific time, click Options on the toolbar within the email window, followed by Delay Delivery, then specify the time and date you require in the boxes beside ‘Do not deliver before’.
Send large attachments
Many services won’t send emails over a certain size (Gmail, for example, won’t let you send or receive emails over 25MB), so linking to large attachments online, rather than attaching them, will give your emails a better chance of reaching their intended destination.
In Gmail, rather than clicking the compose window’s paperclip icon to attach a file, click the ‘Insert files using Drive’ icon (a large triangle). Click ‘Upload’ on the box that appears, followed by ‘Select files from your device’. Choose the file you want to share, followed by Upload, and Gmail will add a download link within your message.
Unsurprisingly, Outlook works best with Microsoft’s Onedrive, the online storage service built into Windows, but you need to be running Outlook 2016 or later. Click ‘Insert’ on the toolbar when writing your email, followed by Attach File. Select the file in the usual way and it will be attached at the top of the message. To move it from the email to Onedrive, click the down arrow on the right-hand side of the attachment, hover over Upload and click the Onedrive option (see screenshot above). A link to your file will now appear in the email.
You can set Thunderbird to automatically upload files over a certain size to the free Wetransfer storage service. Press Alt+t and click Options, then click Attachments in the sidebar, followed by the Outgoing tab. Click the ‘Add Wetransfer’ button, then close the Options window. When you’re next writing an email, click the Attach button and select your file in the usual way. If it’s larger than 5MB, Thunderbird will display a warning. Click ‘Link’ and your attachment will be uploaded to Wetransfer, with a download link added to your email.