How To Send Email From Your Gmail Account

Introduction

Sending an email from any program, including Google's Gmail client is slightly more involved than how it sounds. When you use Google's search engine, in comparison to Gmail, there isn't much effort in navigating to the Google.com home page and typing in your search term to bring up results. Sending a Gmail message to another recipient also starts with the Google.com home page, but successfully getting the message to other email users can be a process that takes several seconds to a few minutes, depending on how long the message is.

Another way to think about sending an email message is to compare it to sending a letter through regular first class postal mail. You gather your stationery, such as a blank sheet of paper for composition, pen for writing, blank envelope and a postage stamp, all to send a single message to another person. The traditional way of sending a letter to another person sounds laborious by modern communication standards, but for decades this was the primary mode of sending written correspondence to other people.

Also, during this time, a system of checks and quality assurance was built into the mail delivery system, where a post office worker or a machine ensures that a misdirected letter still reaches the right destination, such as when the sender writes the wrong zip code on the envelope. In fact, it's not uncommon to hear stories on the news about how lost letters show up years later because a postal worker was able to figure out who was the intended recipient even though the original information was wrong.

Learning how to send email via Gmail is not as standard for all users, because there are so many variables during the process of composing the email. Also, if you misdirect an email it is simply returned to your email inbox. For these reasons, it's important to get the email message right on the first try.

Step 1

Navigate to the Gmail home page to begin the process of sending an email. The web address is http://mail.google.com. This is how you log in to your email account with your user name and password, so that when you send the email the recipient knows that message is coming from you.

Step 2

Click the Compose button. This is how you will type out your message that you will send to the recipient. This is like a piece of paper and an envelope combined into one on the web page.

Step 3

Type in the recipient's email address in the following format in the "To" field at the top: example@gmail.com . This is how your message knows where to go when you are ready to send off the message.

Step 4

Type in a subject for your email message. After you send the message, the recipient sees this subject in his or her inbox.

Step 5

Type out your message in the body of the field. Proofread the message from top to bottom, making sure you have type in the correct email address. Click the Send button.

Tips

You can use POP email clients with Gmail when you send email from your personal PC. Refer to the Help section of your email client to learn how to use this feature.

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