More email tips - using the gmail "labs" settings

It's always challenging to learn your way into a new software tool.


You know how the old application behaves - its shortcuts and folders. 


The new application might confound your expectations, with different models of behaviour^^. 


At PRACE, we are now using the google-owned gmail to send and receive messages in-house**. And while using the PRACE gmail account to send messages, you may be interested in the more experimental side of things. 


Did you know you can set up a default text styling, for example?
That you can have your text looking a particular way in each message you send, without having to re-format every time...? 


(more after the break)

Jill from Carlton was asking me how to do this, and i had no idea. But a quick google search brought up several pages, including these:

• via about dot com
• via worldstart

..telling me that it's a gmail "labs" thing, called "enable Default Text Styling in Gmail".


Here's how you do it. 
1) First go into gmail settings, the "labs" tab. 

2) enable gmail labs thing (settings > labs)

This adds an extra section to your gmail settings > general tab. 


3) change your default (now in settings > general)

What else have you found in the gmail "labs" settings? Anything to share with your colleagues here? 
Please add a comment with anything you've discovered, or anything you'd like to know. Perhaps we can help. 

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Notes: 

**NB: In fact, you can still use your old email address, as long as you set up the gmail to forward incoming messages to your existing account. 


Many accounts allow you to pretend to send from the gmail PRACE account (my fastmail email account allows me to send from my @prace.vic.edu.au account, for example. But fastmail is pretty special. Not everyone can do that.)


^^Different email behaviour: Gmail binds messages together as "conversations", so you can see how the back-and-forth messages have progressed. I like it, but not everybody does. And it's different from what you expect. 


Photo by ntr23 (creative commons at flickr). Thanks dude.