Make Gmail Work for You
Gmail Labels are like “folders” in other email applications, but with the advantage that you can apply multiple Labels to individual email items. Thus a single email item can exist simultaneously in multiple folders, and be cross-referenced when searching at a later date.
If you had to go through your inbox each day and apply Labels to all of your received messages, you would likely find the task tedious. Thankfully, Google can do much of the work for you; it’s very easy to spend a few seconds setting up Filters in Gmail to automatically apply Labels to incoming messages.
Most of us receive a majority of email messages from the same people day after day, week after week. Whether from our colleagues, managers, department heads, students, etc., you’re often communicating with the same people, and many of those people are communicating about predictable subjects. Why not have Gmail apply Labels to these messages as they arrive in your inbox?
As an example, our web guru Jeremy sends me a lot of email messages, and they all deal with web design. I can have Gmail apply the “Web” label to Jeremy’s messages automatically. To do so, I’ll click the checkbox next to an existing email from Jeremy, and click the More actions button, then select “Filter messages like these.”
I can create a Filter to act on any message from Jeremy. I’ll leave his name in the From: field, and leave all of the other fields blank for now (though you could certainly fill in more information to narrow your criteria). Click the Next Step button at bottom.
On the Choose Action screen, I’ll add a Star to each incoming email from Jeremy to signify its importance, and I’ll choose to add the “Web” label to each of his messages (if you haven’t already created a Label you wish to use, select “New label…” from the drop-down list).
When finished, click the Create Filter button at bottom. I’ll be prompted to apply this filter to all existing messages from Jeremy; if I say now, Gmail will only apply this Filter to future messages from Jeremy.
From now on, email messages from Jeremy will have the “Web” Label and a Star immediately applied upon arrival. If I want to add more Labels to messages from Jeremy (e.g., a “Jeremy” Label), I’d just set up an additional Filter to do so. When I’m finished with Jeremy’s message, I can immediately remove it from my inbox and keep it in my “Web” label/folder by clicking the Archive button, or the Move To button.
Beyond basic housekeeping, applying Labels to your email items helps sort and find emails when searching. For example, if I know all of my emails from Jeremy are in my Web folder, I can best search for them by typing the following in the Gmail Search box:
A complete list of search terms for Gmail can be found here, which allow you to further sort by date, sender, subject, message body keywords, etc. Of course, you can always use the “Show search options” link to the right of the Search box and entire your search criteria in the fields provided.
