Gmail is one of the most popular and functional tools for managing your email. While Google's service has been around for well over a decade, there are definitely some great features that people aren't leveraging to their best advantage. Here are a few tips on how you can make your inbox more efficient and get Gmail working for you.

Combine multiple email inboxes into one place

Being able to combine all your mail into one central place is easily the best thing about using Gmail. I personally have 10 different email addresses all flowing into the same inbox. Over the years, you may have signed up for a Hotmail or Yahoo account, or maybe have a work account that you'd like to bring into your inbox. You could have a brokerage email as well as an inbox for your own real estate domain. You should be able to do this with most email setups, it just requires you to be able to forward you existing inbox to your Gmail inbox. Here's a couple resources on how to get that going for you.

• How to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail Account
• How To Merge All Of Your Inboxes Into One Gmail Inbox
• Get Started With IMAP and POP3

Once you get this setup, you will be able to send and receive email through your Gmail account. Nobody on your email list would even know that you're using Google's service.

Different Signatures for Different Accounts

Now that you've got multiple email addresses flowing into the same inbox, you'll want to use Gmail's multiple signatures feature. To change your signature, click the gear in the top right of the Gmail site > Settings > General and scroll halfway down the page to find the signatures settings. Each different email address you have can a different signature tied to it, making it easy to manage your inbox without sending out conflicting signatures.

Labels, Folders and Filters

Gmail has a couple different ways of organizing email as it comes in. Labels allow you to flag any email that you receive when it comes into your inbox. It makes it easy to visually identify different types of email when it comes in. I have colour coding for each different email account I have setup, so it makes it easy to know what an email might be pertaining to even before you open it. You can access labels by clicking the gear in the top right > Settings >Labels.

You can change the colour of the label by finding the label in the left sidebar, hover over the name and clicking the small arrow to the right of the name. It'll show a fly-out menu that allows you to customize many options, including the colour of the label.

Folders allow you to keep your inbox nice and tidy. When used in tandem with filters, it makes for a very handy tool. With filters you can set a specific criteria, like say when mail is received to a certain email inbox to put it into a specific folder and apply a certain label to that piece of email. To easily create a filter, use the search box at the top and click the small arrow beside the search button. This will bring out the drop down menu. Just set the criteria you you'd like to filter by, then click the Create filter with this search link at the bottom right. Once you see the filter result, you can also apply the filter to all older emails to filter them accordingly.

Create disposable email addresses with Gmail

One of the neatest things you can do with Gmail is create trackable email addresses. There are times online where you give out your email and you worry that you're going to end up on a million spam lists. Google actually has a solution to this problem. You can covertly add a period to your Gmail address, so [email protected] will work the same as [email protected] and [email protected]. They all resolve to the same inbox. This is handy if you want to keep track of just who might be sharing your email address.

You can also add a plus sign to your email address, so you could share an address like [email protected] to easily filter your newsletter subscriptions. This trick should work for most subscription services, but I have run into instances where they wouldn't accept the plus character in the email. Another instance where this is super handy is for something like Twitter. I have a few different accounts on there and each requires a unique email address to create. Instead of multiple accounts being tied to different email addresses, they can all go to the same inbox. One thing to note here is that this trick will only work with your Gmail email address and not for addresses tied to your domain or brokerage.

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.