One of the biggest hassles in the Gmail program on Android is that the buttons you’re going to want to use the most aren’t easy to find. Sure, “Archive,” “Label” and “Delete are simply two button pushes (underneath the menu) away, but Reply, Reply to All and Forward are on-screen buttons that appear at the bottom of every email. This can be a huge hassle — huge as in “Oh my god, I might not be able to be a power-emailer on this thing” because who knows how long an email may be — sometimes there’s old threads in the chain of emails and sometimes, well, and email is just freaking long.
Good news, though, if you have the keyboard out, there are convenient one-push keyboard shortcuts for most of your popular email functions. We list them for you (plus a bonus feature), after the break!
Android Keyboard Shortcuts for Gmail
Just tap these letters when you’re reading an email to access their function:
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R – Reply
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A – Reply to All
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F – Forward
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Y – Archive
I can understand the decision not to make a keyboard shortcut for delete — archive is better in most cases because you never know when you’ll want to search for something later. However I use labels very heavily and it would have been nice to see a keyboard shortcut to pop up the label listing. Heck, I would have settled for keyboard filtering of labels once that labelling menu had popped up.
Nevertheless, having keyboard shortcuts for Gmail in Android is a lifesaver.
One last bit — when you’re in a mailbox looking at a list of emails, you may know that you can hold your finger down on a message to access a pop-up menu of features. What you may not have known is that you can pop up that same menu by holding down the trackball on a message.