What to Do After Creating a New Gmail Account

Setup your new Gmail Account

Having a new Gmail account entails a lot of things for free, but first things first before anything else. What you want to do when you have a new Gmail account is to setup the account and personalize it further.

The simplest way and the fastest way to start doing this is by clicking on that silhouette of a person’s head enclosed on a circle located near the upper right corner of the Gmail dashboard. Clicking this will allow you to upload a picture of yourself. This picture will later be seen by other Gmail users or basically those who receive your future emails. This picture is called your avatar, and uploading one is important especially if the email address you have used is not your name and something cryptic. The avatar helps to tell others that it’s you.

Customize Your New Gmail Account

The next thing to do when you have a new Gmail account is to try and truly personalize your account by editing some options in your mail settings. If you click the gear icon near the upper right portion of the homepage dashboard of your Gmail account you will be able to access the settings page by clicking on the settings menu item.

Themes and Labels

From this page you can edit Labels, your Gmail theme and many more. Labels will help you categorize the emails you receive by using the labels in your filters. This will make the look and feel of your email a bit more organize. The Theme option will let you decide on which of the available themes takes your fancy.

Signature and Vacation Reply

Setting up your email signature is important if you want to add a level of professionalism to your email replies and messages. Here you can also conveniently include your additional contact numbers for those who want to contact you if you are not online or away. The Vacation reply is important if you won’t be able to respond to emails for an extended period of time. Just like a phone answering machine or mailbox using an auto-reply or vacation reply allows you to assure those who emailed you that you will be in touch as soon as possible.

Import Contacts

After setting up the look and feel or appearance of your new Gmail account the next thing to do in order to complete setting up the account is to add contacts. You either do this manually if you do not have a prior email account or you can easily import contacts from you other email accounts if you have them. In order to add a contact for your new Gmail account click the drop down Gmail menu located on the upper left corner of your Gmail home dashboard. Click on contact and then click on add new contact. Type in all the necessary information and all of which will automatically be saved by the Gmail system.

After setting things up you are now ready to send emails using the new account. If you would like to compare different email providers check our comparison.