Handling your inbox with Gmail labels

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a cluttered inbox. I try to keep my mail organized in such a way where I know exactly where to find something when I need it. In the case of my POP accounts, I have Entourage sort all my incoming mail into folders based on account first, and then a subfolder. If you use Gmail, you’ll find that it doesn’t use folders, but labels. While the lack of folders may push people away from even trying to organize their Gmail inbox, I found that even though I was against using it, once you understand how it works, it’s really not that bad.

If you’ve used folders as long as I have, not having a hierarchical mail setup may seem daunting. For anyone that might not know what using folders means, it means physically moving an email into a subfolder which has been organized by a mail rule, such as “put all email from Aunt Martha in the folder marked ‘Fruitcake’”. This way, any time you want to find emails from Aunt Martha, that’s where they’ll be. You can do the same for incoming mails from friends, mailing lists, etc.

Labels work differently in the sense that instead of physically moving the email into a different folder, you mark it with one or more labels. Yes, you can label an email with more than one label. Typical mail rules generally force you to put the mail in only one folder since it’s being physically moved there. If you want to put one email into two folders (eg: Apple and Development), you can’t without duplicating the email. With labels, one email can be referenced by two or more labels, so you can find it in multiple different places.

When email comes into your Gmail account, it’s automatically given an “Inbox” label. I wasn’t originally aware of this since your inbox doesn’t show any labels except ones that are marked with labels other than “Inbox”; it’s not until you look at other labels, or notice the “Inbox” label on your email, that you notice the label exists. If you remove the “Inbox” labels on your emails, they will disappear from your Inbox section since they no longer have the “Inbox” label. All mail, whether they have labels or not, reside in the “All Mail” section.

If you want to automatically put labels on incoming mail so that they’re placed in a particular section, click on “Settings” and then the “Filters” link. There, you’ll see any filters that exists for your Gmail account. Click on “Create new filter” to begin creating a new filter. For this example, I wanted to put all the emails I get for new Twitter followers into one section so that they’re separated from the rest of my mail, and easier to search through. Note: these rules may change in the future if Twitter changes anything that affects the rules of the Filter, such as a different email address.

Create a label called “Twitter followers”.

In the “From” text field, I put in “@postmaster.twitter.com”

In the “Has the words” field, I put in “is now following you on Twitter!”

Now click on “Next step”.

There’s a checkbox named “Skip inbox”. This is important because as I stated above, all incoming mail is given an “Inbox” label. If you don’t check the “Skip inbox” box, you’ll see these incoming mails in your inbox along with the new label we’re going to tell the rule to give the email. I checked it so that I don’t see these emails cluttering up my inbox.

Make sure the “Apply the label” checkbox is checked, and set the label to the label we created called “Twitter followers”. If there are any emails in your inbox that match the filter you created, they’ll show up in a window below with a checkbox that says “Also apply filter to <number> conversations below”. I would suggest clicking that to clear out your inbox. Click “Update Filter” and you’re done. You should now have all your emails from Twitter announcing who’s following you in their own section, and if you told the filter to, your inbox should now be free of those emails.

Since the Filter tool only allows you to assign one label at a time, you’ll have to set up a second filter for the other label, the differences being the name of the filter you’re assigning, and the need to check the “Skip inbox” checkbox based on the original filter. Also, if you assign one or more labels to a filter type and a rule needs to be changed (such as the subject text changing), you’ll have to change all of them.

So filters aren’t as hideous as they may sound to those of you that are used to folders. Some email apps like Entourage, Outlook, and Mail on both Mac OS X and the iPhone treat these label sections as folders so that you can feel more comfortable with them.

Tags: delomni, Gmail, how-to, labels, starman

Category: How-Tos