How to resend an email in Gmail

There’s an endless number of things we love about Gmail. It’s intuitive, offers generous storage, and employs advanced security features. Of course, you can’t forget the fact that Gmail and Streak integrate beautifully together. 

Unfortunately, there’s one thing Gmail doesn’t offer users (at least not yet)— there’s no straightforward way to resend an email. Let’s talk about a few reasons you might need to resend an email and ways you can work around this missing feature. 

Why resend an email?

The average office employee sends 40 emails a day. With that kind of volume, there are bound to be a few different reasons you might need to resend an email. 

You wrote an exceptional email.

Some emails are so good they deserve to be used again and again. A well-composed email can serve as a template for future communication to help you save time and maintain consistency. This is especially helpful when you know it’s an effective email that’s yielded positive outcomes in the past.

There was an error in the original email.

Typos happen to the best of us, and a misspelled word probably doesn’t merit a resend (although you can recall an email if you catch it in time!). However, if an email contains a factual error, such as the wrong time or cost of something, or if it’s missing necessary information, resending the email allows you to make corrections and ensure everyone is on the same page.

You want to send the same email to a different person. 

Sometimes you need to share the same information with someone new. Typing out the same message is an ineffective– and probably irritating– solution when you already have the content written. 

You need to follow up.

It could be that you need confirmation of receipt or that the recipient needs to take action. Either way, seeing your email again helps remind the recipient to engage with its contents.

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7 steps to resend an email in Gmail

In less than 60 seconds you can resend an email to new recipients.

1. Open Chrome and log in to Gmail if your account information isn’t automatically saved.
2. Scroll your sent box or use the search feature to locate the email, then double-click to open it. 
3. Copy the body of the email.
4. Select Compose, and a New Message window will open.
5. Paste the copied text into the body of the new email.
6. Make any necessary edits and choose the recipient.
7. Proofread and send.

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Alternative options for email resending

Copying + pasting an email isn’t especially time-consuming, but there are even faster and more effective ways to resend an email in Gmail. 

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Streak snippets

Text shortcuts aren’t just for your phone. Streak snippets allow you to fill out saved text with one key command. Snippets can be inserted into an email body using hashtags, dollar signs, or your natural language. 

You can also share snippets across your team to help everybody streamline consistent communication with leads and customers. 

Is your support team often helping new customers reset their passwords? Create a /password for your support team to automatically populate instructions when they type the shortcut into an email draft.

Maybe you find yourself constantly reaching out to accounting to get the most recent sales numbers for your end of week report. The snippet /weeklyreport could populate the email for you so all you need to do is add the dates.

Snippets work for any email you’re writing with Gmail, whether you’re composing a new email or writing a reply. They even include subjects, so you can be done typing ‘Thanks for your interest’ for the 817th time. 

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Gmail templates

Gmail also offers the ability to save time by utilizing templates. To create a Gmail template:

1. Click on the Settings icon, which is a gear in the top right corner
2. Select See all settings.

3. Click on the Advanced tab to get to the template option.

4. Enable templates by toggling on the "Enable" button in the Templates section.

5. Click Save Changes at the bottom.

Now that you’ve enabled templates, you can save emails to reuse in the future. To do this, compose an email you want to use as a template in Gmail. 

Then, click on the three dot icon at the bottom right corner of the email screen, next to the trash icon. 

Hover over Templates, then Save draft as template, then Save as new template. 

Once you’ve saved your template you can use it as often as you need. To insert a Gmail template into an email draft:

1. Click Compose to begin a new email. 
2. Click on the three dot icon again. 
3. Hover over Templates, then select the template you want to use from the “Insert template” menu. 

Gmail allows the use of up to 50 templates. Once you’ve created your templates, they don’t take very long to insert into a new email— it’s just not quite as fast as the Snippet shortcuts available with Streak. 

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Mail merge

You don’t have to learn an entirely new email platform to send personalized, tracked mass emails and follow-up sequences. All it takes is Streak + Gmail to send a mail merge in three easy steps.

1. Compose your email in Gmail.
2. Upload a list of email addresses (or choose contacts from your Streak pipeline).
3. Use variables to send a personalized email to each recipient.

You can personalize your emails by the recipient’s name, company, or other personal factors. Mail merge can save you from copying and pasting the same template over and over while you tweak a few spots of personalization each time. It’s an extremely efficient way to email leads, follow up after a seminar, or send important information to everyone in an organization at the same time. 

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Forward 

Forwarding can be the optimal way to resend an email if you want to refer to the content or date of the original email, especially if you’re communicating with the original recipient. If you just want to reuse the content within the body, be sure to delete the text at the top that is automatically included in a forward, which typically includes the original sender and recipient, subject, and date. 

If you have an automatic signature, you may need to delete it as well to ensure it’s not duplicated at the bottom of your new email. 

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Email more efficiently

According to the Harvard Business Review, the average professional spends 2.6 hours on emails every day. Why not take back that time so you can focus on other tasks?

With Streak you can—

• schedule emails and automatic follow up.
• track emails so you’re not guessing who to follow up with.
• email hundreds of potential leads in a few clicks.

Try Streak for free— it only takes 30 seconds to get started.