

Mini-productivity tip: send a Gmail without getting distracted by your inbox - uberc

Easily distracted by new email messages (or old ones that make you feel guilty for not replying) whenever you go to Gmail to send an email?<p>Try this: instead of going to Gmail directly and being confronted by your inbox as normal, create a web shortcut for this URL --<p>https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm<p>-- and click that instead. You'll get a clean, distraction-less Gmail compose new message screen. You can send your email and be on your way as if your inbox never existed.
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scottyallen
I do this too:) I've aliased this to the keyword "sendmail" in chrome by
adding it as a search engine in preferences, so I can just type "sendmail" or
"sendmail email@example.com" in the url bar.

However, an even higher win for me is aliasing search in the same way. I used
to find that when I went into my email to look for a particular piece of info
I would get so distracted by my inbox that I never ended up completing the
task I was originally working on. I've aliased
[https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/<searcht...](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/<searchterm>);
to "ms <searchterm>", such that I can type "ms paypal" in my url bar and get
all my recent paypal receipts without having to be tempted by my inbox first:)

My only frustration is that gmail is still so damn slow to load. I know
they've spent a lot of time trying to make this fast (I spent about 2 years
working on reducing latency on Google search), but they're still so far away
from where they could be.

I really, really wish gmail loaded the html first, showing my inbox or search
or whatever, and then loaded and attached all the javascript later. This could
result in search level latencies for the initial load of data for the user to
start looking at, even if it took a while longer to be fully interactive.

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uberc
Very nice re: the search alias. Thanks for sharing that -- it was the next
thing I was going to try to figure out. I just wish there was a way to get a
Gmail search result without the sidebar with the number of unread emails in
your inbox... To look or not to look... :-)

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scottyallen
I think you can turn off that that unread number somewhere in the options. It
still shows up in bold if there are unread emails, but it's a partial solution
at least.

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arikrak
I used to have <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#compose> bookmarked to avoid
needing 2 steps to write a mail, but then Gmail came out with their new
compose box. But the above lets you avoid the sidebar entirely..

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tagabek
Thanks! That's a really cool tip! There are so many interesting features that
Gmail (and many other Google products) has to offer. My favorites are
everything that goes on behind the hood.

