title: “How To Report A Bug In Gmail” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-28” author: “Constance Hammons”
How to Report a Gmail Bug
To report a bug or to offer feedback:
From your Gmail inbox screen, select the Support icon (question mark). Select Send Feedback to Google. Type your feedback into the box. To include an optional screenshot, check the Include screenshot box. The browser window containing Gmail is automatically captured. Optionally, select the overlay text on the screenshot that says Click to highlight or hide info. If you’re OK with the Gmail team seeing everything in the screenshot, skip this step and the next. Use the yellow and black boxes to mark up the screenshot. Use yellow to emphasize problem areas and black to suppress private information you don’t want Google’s engineers to see. The tools draw rectangles of any size you wish. Click Done when you’re finished with the tool. Verify the text of your feedback and that the thumbnail of your screenshot (if it’s included) match your expectations. Press Send.
Best Practices for Reporting a Gmail Bug or Sending Google Feedback
Specific information is always better than generic complaints. Saying that something “doesn’t work” is less helpful to an engineer than to say that “button X does not activate when I’ve selected option Y.”
Be calm: Bugs happen. Showering the tech-support team with angry comments or demands for speedy intervention will not help get the problem resolved with any additional speed. Be concise: State the problem completely, but don’t write a book. Focus on the problem only, and offer only one problem per support ticket or feedback session. List the steps you took to generate the bug: If you can make the problem repeat, list the steps (in order) to make the bug reappear. Share if the bug is repeatable: Was it a one-time glitch, or does it persist even after you’ve taken the usual troubleshooting steps of rebooting, clearing browser caches, etc. ? Provide evidence of the problem: Add screenshots, error-log reports, or file attachments (where possible) that show the problem in its context. Offer relevant context: If you can’t get a social-login button to work, for example, it’s worth sharing whether you’re running any privacy plugins with your browser.
