Google Mail - Understanding & Creating Labels
One of the hardest concepts when transitioning people to Google Mail from a software-based email application is the idea that all mail is "in" one location. In thinking of email in a traditional sense (like snail mail), we think of sorting it "to" locations. It is in the inbox, in the trash, in a folder, etc.
When using Google Mail in the web, all your mail is in one location (I think of it as being a junk room full of my email). Instead of organizing the emails "into" folders, we actually are tagging emails to make them easier to find (think of it as putting stickie notes on them). This gives us great flexibility as emails can have multiple stickie notes on them - and I do not have to remember "where" I put them! An example - an email in my inbox has a tag of "unread" (which makes it bold) and Inbox (so it appears when I click on Inbox).
This brings us to labels - these are the tags we want to create and assign to our emails. And, when I click on a tag name, it is actually doing a quick SEARCH for all the emails with that tag (after all, Google started as a search engine!).
Here is how to create a label.
You can either go to the left side, and under all the options there select Create new label:
OR you can select an email, then at the top click on the label icon (looks like a Christmas gift tag) and select Create new there:
A window will pop up, so you can enter the name of your new label:
You can even "nest" the labels to organize them in a specific way other than alpha:
When using Google Mail in the web, all your mail is in one location (I think of it as being a junk room full of my email). Instead of organizing the emails "into" folders, we actually are tagging emails to make them easier to find (think of it as putting stickie notes on them). This gives us great flexibility as emails can have multiple stickie notes on them - and I do not have to remember "where" I put them! An example - an email in my inbox has a tag of "unread" (which makes it bold) and Inbox (so it appears when I click on Inbox).
This brings us to labels - these are the tags we want to create and assign to our emails. And, when I click on a tag name, it is actually doing a quick SEARCH for all the emails with that tag (after all, Google started as a search engine!).
Here is how to create a label.
You can either go to the left side, and under all the options there select Create new label:
OR you can select an email, then at the top click on the label icon (looks like a Christmas gift tag) and select Create new there:
A window will pop up, so you can enter the name of your new label:
You can even "nest" the labels to organize them in a specific way other than alpha:
