Getting to Know the Gmail Interface

Once you sign up for your Gmail account, you get assigned your email address (in the form of name@gmail.com) and you get access to the Gmail inbox page, shown in Figure 21.2.

Figure 21.2. The Gmail inbox.

[View full size image]

The default view of the Gmail page is the inbox, which contains all your received messages. You can switch to other views by clicking the appropriate links at the left side or the bottom of the page. For example, to view all your sent mail, simply click the Sent Mail link on the left; to view only unread messages, click the Unread link at the bottom.

Each message is listed with the message's sender, the subject of the message, a short snippet from the message itself, and the date or time the message was sent. (The snippet is typically the first line of the message text.) Unread messages are listed in bold; once a message has been read, it's displayed in normal, nonbold text.

To perform an action on a message or group of messages, put a check mark by the message(s), and then click one of the buttons at the bottom of the page. Alternatively, you can pull down the More Actions list and select another action to perform.