Chapter 2 Using Gmail for Email Communications
Communication with your clients or your employer is an important part of being a data scientist. E-mail, short for electronic mail, is an important part of the communication picture because of its flexibility. You can write messages of varying lengths, use formatting if you desire, and attach documents as needed. Depending on your particular work situation, email may be your main means of communicating about your work.
When using a Chromebook on the cloud, the email application of choice is Gmail. Gmail is a free e-mail service provided by Google that provides users with a gigabyte of free storage for messages and includes the ability to easily search for specific emails. Gmail also automatically organizes related emails into a conversational thread, meaning that a message and all replies to that message are stored together.
Gmail has many of similarities with other web-based email clients, such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. If you regularly use email through an internet browser, much of the following will be review.
2.0.1 Accessing your Gmail Inbox
Gmail is included with your Google account, so you should already have access to Gmail through the account you set up in your first introductory course. Your email address will be username@gmail.com, where username is the username of your Google account. For example, if your user name is Jane.Doe then your email address would be Jane.Doe@gmail.com. This is one reason to choose an appropriate user name, since this email address will be visible to anyone you communicate with over email!
You can access Gmail by going to the address “https://www.gmail.com” or by clicking on the start menu located on the lower left hand corner of your Chromebook and searching for “Gmail”. If you are not already logged into your account, you will see a prompt similar to the one here.
Login screen
After inputting your Google username and password you will be able to see your inbox. If you are already logged into your Google account, you will be brought immediately to your inbox without the need to first log in.
Inbox
Your inbox shows you all of the messages you’ve received through Gmail. Messages you have already read are shaded gray, while those you haven’t read yet are white. You can open a message to read it by clicking on the message stripe.
By default, Gmail organizes your emails into three groups: Primary, Social, and Promotions. You can switch between these groups using the tabs at the top of the screen.
Tabs
The “Primary” tab will contain the majority of the email messages that you will care about reading and responding to. The “Social” tab will contain messages related to social media, such as messages from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The “Promotions” tab will contain messages that include offers for purchasing products or signing up for services. Gmail uses machine learning to put new messages into the appropriate tab. As mentioned before, the “Primary” tab will be the main focus of using your email as a data scientist.
One nice feature of Gmail is that it organizes related emails into a conversational thread. The message indicated by the red arrow is an example of a conversational thread, where an original message and all of its replies are grouped together.
Inbox indicating thread
By clicking on this message, you can see all of the individual messages that make up the email conversation, and can open each individual message by clicking on it.
Example email thread
2.0.2 Composing and Sending Emails
Let’s say you want to send an email to a client. The first step is to start a new message by pressing the “Compose” button on the top left corner of your inbox.
Compose button
A box will pop-up where you can enter the recipient’s email address (in the To field), the subject of the email, and the content of the email.
New message
You can send an email to multiple people by entering all the emails one after another in front of To. You can also add recipients in the Cc (carbon copy) or Bcc (blind carbon copy) fields by clicking on either of these links to the right of the To area. Recipients who are copied (Cc) will receive the email as if it is addressed to them; this option in usually used if you want them to be aware of the message but aren’t expecting them to take any action or reply. Recipients who are blind copied (Bcc) will receive the message, but their email addresses won’t be visible to other recipients of the email. This option is often used when sending an email to a long list of recipients where you don’t want each individual to see the other people on the email.
You should also include a short informative subject in the Subject area so that the recipient will know what the contents of the email are about. This is also helpful later when you may want to search your email to find a particular message.
There are also a few buttons in the menu bar at the very bottom of the email box that are very helpful. The attachment button, which looks like a paperclip, can be used to attach a file from your computer (such as an image, a document, or a video) to your email message.
Attachment from computer
You can also attach a file from Google Drive to your message by clicking on the Google Drive button, which looks like a triangle. Google Drive is Google’s file hosting service and you will learn more about it in a later lesson.
Attachment from Google Drive
You can send attachments up to 25 MB in size through Gmail. If you have more than one attachment, they can’t add up to more than 25 total. If your file is greater than 25 MB, you can instead upload the file to Google Drive and share a link to the file over email instead of including it as an attachment.
Other options in this menu bar include inserting a photo (with the picture button), inserting a link (with the chain button), emojis (with the smiley face button), or even sending money (with the dollar sign button).
Other menu options
There are also many formatting options available for your email message, such as changing the font type and size, bolding text, including bullet lists, and more. These formatting options are similar to those available through Google Docs, which you will see in a later lesson, so we won’t spend time on them now. But you can find these options under the format button, which looks like an uppercase A with a line under it.
Formatting options
Finally, once you are ready to send your message, click the “Send” button at the bottom left of the message box. If you type an email but change your mind about sending it, you can delete the email by clicking on the trash can button in the bottom right corner of the new message box.
Send or discard draft
If you close the new message box without deleting it, it will automatically be saved as a draft message, and you can find it under the “Drafts” link in the list of link on the left-hand side of your inbox.
Drafts
2.0.3 Replying to a message
To read an email message, simply click on the message stripe. If you want to reply to the message, you can scroll to the bottom of the message to the reply box. To reply, simply click in the box and start typing your response. After writing your response to the email click the send button and you are done!
Reply
To forward the message to someone else, click on the “Forward” link and type the new recipient’s email address in the “To” area. You can then click in the message box to add a note to the forwarded message.
If there is more than one other person on the email, you will also have any option to “Reply to all”, which means that your response will be sent to all the people who were on the original email. Use this option with caution, and only when you need all of the people to see your response.
2.0.4 Searching for specific messages
To find a particular email message in your inbox, you can search using the search box at the top of the Gmail screen. Searching your Gmail inbox is very similar to searching the internet using Google. You can search by a word in subject of the email, the name of the person who sent the email, or the content of the email. For example, to find all messages from John Doe, you could type “from:john.everyday.doe@gmail.com” in this search box. To find messages that include the words “cancer data”, you could type “cancer data” in this search box.
Search Box
If you click the down arrow next to the search box, you will open a window that allows more specific options, such as searching by either sender or recipient, searching for specific words in the subject line, or searching by whether the message includes or doesn’t include certain words. You can also specify specific dates to search for messages.
Advanced search
2.0.5 More specifics on using Gmail
We have touched very briefly on some of the basics of using Gmail: accessing your account, sending and replying to messages, and searching for a particular message. There are lots of other features of Gmail that you may want to explore now or at a future time. There are many good beginner tutorials on using Gmail on YouTube.com.
Google also has extensive information on getting started with Gmail on their G Suite Learning Center, which can be found at the following web address: https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/products/gmail/get-started/#!/ In this tutorial, you can find additional information about creating and sending email messages, organizing your inbox, searching your email, and more!