Are you a power Gmail user? If not, these 6 little known, yet useful Gmail tips can get you on the road to being a power Gmail user today!

1. Import your contacts from Outlook, Thunderbird or Yahoo! Mail to Gmail. Don’t spend your entire weekend trying to copy your contacts over from another program or service! Just export your contacts as a .csv file and upload to Gmail. You can upload up to 3,000 contacts at a time. Here’s a detailed how-to on importing contacts using this method.

GmailAssistant is an amazing little java application that allows you to check multiple Gmail accounts including Gmail for Domains at the same time. GmailAssistant accesses your Google accounts securely using IMAP over SSL. Basically folks, that means that it’s pretty secure!

GmailAssistant allows you to completely customize your notification options. You can choose to have it find all mail, unread in the Inbox, and even mail with specific labels. You can even choose different alert methods…i.e. popup message, chime, blink keyboard LED.

If you happen to be one of the many people who use their built-in mobile web browser to check your e-mail, chances are you get frustrated by that little scroll wheel or tiny scrollbar when trying to move around inside the page.

If you’ve used the web-based version of Gmail on your mobile browser you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Like when you open an e-mail, read its contents, then decide you want to archive or delete it; you usually have to scroll nearly all the way down to the bottom and click on the appropriate link or whatever other link you were trying to click. This can be quite awkward if you’re reading an e-mail that your sister sent you that’s 45 pages long and you’re just trying to easily delete or archive it. In last month’s Gmail podcast, Chuck Tomasi talked about a feature he calls “Speed Dialing”.

I have had the email purists gang up on me for this in the past but I constantly use my Gmail account for backing up my digital life. This has led to the online lynch mobs chanting “an email account is not for backing up important documents!” and they are right to a certain extent. I wouldn’t dream of putting into my Gmail account things like my passport or my birth certificate. I’m not stupid!

With the advent of Apple’s new iPhone and iPod Touch, a whole host of websites have set up mobile version of their regular site. Notable among these various sites is Gmail and all of the related Google web services. (disclaimer: for the rest of this article I will be referring to the iPod touch, but I tested the application to the same extent on the iPhone as well.)

For a while I didn’t have any native mail application on my iPod touch. I bought by iPod in September and didn’t want to pay 20 dollars for the January application upgrade. Being a Gmail user, I was delighted to find that Gmail was such a versatile web app and can be conveniently accessed both from iPhone and iPod Touch.

I am always mystified about why people would want to do this but there is now a way for you to read your Gmail email in a RSS reader.

Previously, it was very difficult, bordering on impossible. Gmail has a RSS feed which is called an “authenticated feed” which basically means you need to enter your username and password in order to access it. A lot of web-based RSS services, including Google Reader ironically enough, don’t support authenticated feeds. In fact, they still don’t. So what FreeMyFeed does is act as the middle man, taking your feed and swapping it for a proxy that the RSS service WILL accept.