How many people out there are still using AOL Mail? I assumed it was all of three people, but apparently there’s still a considerable number of you clinging to your aol.com accounts.

Do you hope AOL will make a grand resurgence one day? Are you nostalgic for the sounds of a dial-up modem? Do you hate Gmail? You can move providers; it’ll be OK.

Gmail contacts can be a little confusing — especially once you realise that the popular email service automatically dumps everyone you cyber-converse with into a big "Other Contacts" directory. That makes it easy to autocomplete emails to people Gmail thinks you might interact with again at some future point, but it can also cause a little confusion when unintended names or email addresses appear in your "To:" field.

It’s time to tackle yet another perplexing problem this week - how to set up a non-Gmail email account in Gmail.

Every time I go to write an email, I get distracted by my inbox. I check all my new mail, and I put off the actual task I opened Gmail for. None of that new email was urgent, but I couldn't ignore all those bold lines. So now I hide my inbox with Inbox When Ready.

It’s not a stretch to assume you probably use Gmail—it seems like most of the world does, these days. That reality has created consternation over some of the recent privacy and security-related changes to Gmail and Google Chrome.

No one is happy about how email works.

Bad news for fans of innovative email systems: Inbox by Gmail is shutting down, less than four years after it first saw the light of day. If you’re a deeply invested Inbox user, where can you find the same sorts of features and tools beyond next March? We’ve got some ideas.

A few years ago a friend told me about Streak, a Gmail extension that allows you to track whether your email has been opened. For me it was a game changer, simply because it allowed me to have some concept of whether or not a message had made it to the person I intended or had gotten stuck in a spam folder in cyberspace somewhere.

Sure, you can hunt around the internet for the best tricks for Google's various services, such as Gmail, Search and YouTube. Alternatively, you can hear the best tips straight from Google's employees.

Gmail's Smart Replies feature, now cemented into the service's latest design update for desktop clients, are a great way to send pithy responses when you don't feel like typing out a real one. Sure, they might annoy recipients; and you might even tap the wrong reply, inadvertently telling your boss "love it!" when he or she asks you to put in some extra work this weekend. But aren't they convenient?

Whenever you click that easy "Sign in With Google" button on a company's website, you're granting the app or service access to some of your information. While in some cases that might just be access to your name and email address, for others you're giving that company the ability to read your email as well.

You may have noticed that the most recent Chrome browser update includes a change to the way Chrome syncs — or, more accurately, doesn’t sync — to your Google account. Specifically, if you sign into or out of Gmail, your Google account will be signed into or out of the Google Sync Chrome browser automatically.

If that happens, your bookmarks, saved passwords and other synced data won’t be accessible until you sign back in manually, not to mention it forcibly signs you out of every other Google service as well.

Android/iOS: In April, Google brought a new confidential mode to Gmail’s desktop version, allowing you to send emails that automatically expire. The idea being that if you use Gmail to send confidential information (which let’s face it, isn’t the safest idea), then using the confidential mode will make that decision a little bit safer.

In this week's Tech 911 - the column where we offer reasonable answers and explanations for of your deepest, darkest tech confusions - a Lifehacker reader wonders why she can't access some of Gmail's best features with a third-party email client (and a non-Gmail address).

Sometimes things are just better said with a GIF, but adding a GIF to an email exchange is sometimes easier said than done. This week Gyfcat released a Gmail add-on that eliminates the hassle and makings adding GIFs to emails you send to everyone from your boss to your BFF easy to do.

All browsers: Google and Dropbox are now collaborating on a brand-new "Dropbox add-on for Gmail", which will make it easy to share the contents of your Dropbox directly within Gmail. If you're going the other way, it's also a lot easier to dump files directly into your Dropbox, saving you the step of having to pull up your Downloads folder and manually drag the file over yourself.

There are many reasons you might want to back up your Gmail account, such as: It’s good to have a copy of your most-important data; you’re about to be fired from your job and you want to save everything you did; you’d just like a little extra protection in case someone hacks your account and takes it over (or deletes it).

It will come as no surprise that, as the editor of a website devoted to productivity, I'm obsessive about refining the details of my tech life to be certain every element is helping me get the job done. While I have software that I swear by (WriteRoom, Deckset, Evernote), I'm more of an evangelist for browser extensions.

My favourite Chrome extensions are lightweight, easy-to-install and usually free, but the effect they have on my productivity is profound. These are the extensions that I love most fervently and recommend most frequently.

One of Gmail's cool new features is the "nudge", which moves certain emails to the top of your inbox and suggests you take action. This is actually two features: Gmail asks if you want to reply to received email and if you want to follow up on sent email.