SALT LAKE CITY — You may feel a little overwhelmed when someone mentions Gmail, Google’s free email service. This may be because your inbox is an abyss of forwards and a reminder of tasks to complete. But these tips and tricks might be the solution to helping you better navigate and manage your email account.

Priority inbox

Ever wish that you could organize your inbox according to importance? Gmail makes that possible.

The Priority Inbox setting on Gmail can help you organize your inbox by unread emails, importantly marked emails, starred emails and everything else. Enable the feature by going to the inbox tab in settings and changing your inbox type to “priority inbox.”

Undo a sent message

Ever sent an email you regretted? Well, Gmail gives you the option to unsend. The catch is that you only have 5 to 30 seconds after you send an email to unsend it.

Go to the "general" tab under settings and enable “undo send.” Once you enable this feature, you can select if you want 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds to unsend an email. Now, the “unsend” button will appear for up to 30 seconds whenever you send an email.

Canned responses

If you feel like you’re repeating yourself with emails you respond to, consider canned responses. This allows you to save and reuse emails you send. It also automatically sends canned responses when your inbox receives similar emails, using filters.

You can turn on canned responses by going into your settings and enabling the feature under the “advanced” tab.

Google Calendar

You can keep your inbox organized and make a calendar of events too! Google Calendar is a feature that saves appointments and important dates found in the text of your emails and puts them all together on the side of your inbox.

Enable this feature in the labs section of your settings.

Ranking importance

You are probably familiar with the “starred” and “important” tabs on emails. Marking emails is a great way to prioritize responses. There is a more advanced way to rank your emails though.

In the "general" section of settings, you can choose different colors of stars to mark your emails with. Each color can have a varying level of priority. This is a great option for people with a full inbox.

Cleaning out your inbox and trash

Gmail accounts typically have an allotted amount of free storage (around 15 gigabytes). Emails you receive with pictures and video attachments can take up a lot of space.

To clean out your trash of large emails like this, you can search for emails that have attachments and that take up a lot of space. If you go to the search bar, click the arrow in the right-hand corner of the box. There are options in the menu that allow you to search for specific types of emails.

Once you search for those emails, you can select all by hitting the select button on the top of your inbox (instead of clicking them all separately). You can then delete all these emails. This will save you a few gigabytes of data, along with cleaning your inbox a bit.

Desktop notifications

If you don’t want to have to constantly check your Gmail tab, you can enable desktop notifications on your computer or laptop. This means you’ll get a pop-up notification when you receive an email.

To do this, go to the "general" tab of your settings and enable desktop notifications.

See more messages

If you receive a large number of emails, consider maximizing your message limit. The typical limit for emails per page is 25, but you can maximize it to 50 or 100 emails per page. You can also minimize your email limit if you’re feeling overwhelmed.

Enable this feature by going to settings > general > maximize page size.

Keyboard shortcuts

Now using Gmail is easier than the click of a button. Gmail has specific keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly do your daily email tasks. For example, "command + c" (or "control + c" if you are on a PC) can be clicked to compose a new email. You can also use "x" to select an email or "e" to archive one.

Here’s a full list of the keyboard shortcuts you can use.

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