Customizing Gmail Settings

Let’s go back to the Inbox on the phone.Press the Menu button and tap Settings.You can con- figure two types of options:General settings and Notification settings.

General Settings

In the General settings section,you have the following options:

• Signature: A signature is a blurb of text that appears at the bottom of your email mes- sages.You can use only text.Images are not supported.The signature you specify here is specific to your phone,so you can set up something to show that you’re typing on a tiny keyboard and might make some typographic errors.Or you can brag about your new phone.

• Labels: As we just showed you,labels are a powerful little feature.Perhaps you want to receive only certain emails on your phone,and you’ve set up a filter to automatically apply a certain label to emails.Here you can select synchronization settings for any label.This will affect what messages get downloaded to your phone,which can be very useful if you happen to have a data plan that limits the amount of data you are able to download.Currently,for your Inbox,you have two options:Sync recent or Sync all,while all other labels have a third option of blank. Honestly,between you,me and the untold others reading this book,this feature as it is while I’m writing isn’t very useful.If you were able to set the Inbox not to synchronize, but synchronize only starred items or certain labels,then it would be far more useful. But,as it stands,you can’t not sync the Inbox,so to only sync certain items,you’d need to set up a filter that archives everything that you don’t want to get on your phone. Which would then make the web-based interface mostly useless.The key reason to use this feature is to sync all items for a particular label,so you’ll always be able to see them.

To change the settings for each label,just tap the label.You can choose from the following options:

• Sync all: This option simply means that all items with this label will be synchronized with your phone.

• Sync recent: This option synchronizes all unread items.

• Blank: If the synchronization has no option listed,none of the items will be synchronized.

Notification Settings

You can configure several different notification options.

• Email notifications: By default,your phone notifies you with an icon in the status bar every time you get a new message.Tap this option to deselect it if you don’t want this to happen.

• Select ringtone: Tap this option to choose a ringtone to play whenever you get a new message.

• Vibrate: If this option is checked,your phone vibrates whenever you get a new message.