Take control of your Gmail Inbox

June 8th, 2007 | Gmail, Tech, Tutorials

I rely on Gmail quite heavily. It’s my primary email client, and my primary email address is an @gmail.com address. I remember getting an invite way back in the day when Gmail was invite only. It was cool to have a Gmail account! Now they are free for anyone, and it makes sense to have one for various reasons (2+ GB of space, 20MB attachments, Gmail Drive, web-based, etc).

One great feature of Gmail is labels. Labels allow you to assign words to your email messages that help describe them, and make searching through your email very easy. You can have as many labels as you can imagine.

After the jump, see an example of using a label in Gmail.

You can be clever with the use of labels by assigning a label to incoming email, and having that email automatically archived on receipt. This way, the email doesn’t clutter your Inbox, and you can see at a quick glance what new email you have by looking at your labels panel. For example, in the image above, you can see the “!facebook” label shows a (1) beside the text…this shows me that I have one new email from facebook.com (either a new message notification, newsletter, etc) that bypassed my regular inbox.

To view the email, I can click on the label and Gmail will automatically perform a mail search with the label name as the query, returning the results in a custom “inbox” for that label.

To setup automatic labeling of incoming email, do the following:

Click on “Create a filter” on the main Gmail page.
Enter the name (or email address) of the person your email will come from in the “From” field, or choose another field to use as the filter.
If you already have email from the person who you are labeling, you can click the “Test Search” button to see that your search returns the correct results. Once you’ve verified the filter, click “Next step”.
On the next screen, check the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” checkbox. This means the email will not appear in your inbox, but instead will be archived.
Check the “Apply the label:” checkbox and choose an existing label from the drop down menu (or create a new one by scrolling to the last item in the menu “New label…”
Click “Create Filter” and that’s it! Now anytime you receive email matching your label’s criteria, the email will be archived and it will update the count in your label panel!