Gmail/Send mail

Need to send an email?

Gmail makes it very easy to send emails to your friends. First log into your Gmail account. Once you have logged into your account, you will notice a prominent link under the Gmail logo that reads, "+ Compose". The "+ Compose" link is the link you will be pressing whenever you send an email.

Analyzing the screen

Once you click the "Compose Mail" link within your Gmail account, the page will change. You will be taken to a new page where you will actually write your email, or better said, compose your email. Lets analyze this new page.

First you will notice that there are three new buttons that have appeared. These buttons are in the following order: Send, Save Now, and Discard. The Send button is only pressed once you have completed composing your email in order to send the email to the addressee. The Save Now button is used to save the email to your account's draft folder in order to access it, and maybe finish writing the email, in a later time. The Discard button is used when you would like to discard the email or better said, delete the email. Take note that when you discard an email it is deleted and unrecoverable.

Next we will notice there is a To: field on the page. This field is where you type the email address of the person you are sending the email to. For example, if you are sending an email to Linus and his email is linus@linux.org then you will type linus@linux.org into the To: field. You can also send the same email to multiple email address by adding a ; between email address. For example, I can send an email to more than one friend by typing their emails into the To: field in the following format: linus@linux.org; richardstallman@gnu.org

The next text field that we see is the Subject field. This is where you type the subject of the email. The subject will be seen by the person that you are sending the email prior to he or she opening the email. It is good practice to include descriptive but short subjects whenever possible.

Last but not least, we have the body field. This field is not labeled as body but that is what it is called. The body field is where you will be writing your email.

How to send the email

Once you have filled in each field you will be able to send the email. This is done by pressing the Send button which is located at the bottom of the screen. Try to send an email to your self in order to practice the fine art of email composing.