Gmail Organizing

Gmail Organizing: a reader asks…

Hi Chris, I recently switched from AOL email to the trendier Gmail. I’m finding it challenging to re-sort my mail into folders like I had in AOL. Any suggestions?

The short answer is that Gmail is already self-organized, welcome to the 21st century of email! Gmail offers a lot of advantages besides just being easy to use anywhere, on any device. Such as helping to manage spam (see this article), serving as a master inbox for lots of email accounts (read about that here), and using Gmail with a different email address (tips here). But the best thing I like about using Gmail is how powerful it is for keeping your email organized.

Traditional email filing systems are an outgrowth of our paper-based filing system – the ubiquitous filing cabinet. Inside a filing cabinet you have drawers, inside drawers you have sections, inside those sections you have folders, and inside the folders you have papers. You see the same thing in typical file systems on a computer or in online file storage – these are ‘nested’ structures. The key point of these systems is that any one item (say an email) can only exist in one specific folder. In order to cross-file, you have to place a copy of an email into another folder.

Gmail turns that method on its head, by using ‘labels’ instead of folders. A Gmail label can be assigned to one or many individual emails, and an individual email can have one or many labels. There’s still only one email (no copies), but it’s cross-filed by the label. So when you’re looking at your Gmail account, the labels you see on the left really aren’t folders where you file emails, just labels. Even the ‘Inbox’ is simply a label, every email you have is in ‘All Mail’. So in Gmail, when you file an email and move it out of your inbox, you’re simply removing the Inbox label and adding another label (like Spam or Trash). When you click on a label on the left-side of your Gmail window, you’re really just getting a filtered list of your email based on the label you chose.

Think of these labels as tags or keywords and Gmail’s power becomes even more evident. By now we’re all used to searching the internet using keywords, and identifying people in pictures by tagging them. Once a keyword or tag has been assigned, it’s much faster to find the file or picture by searching on the keyword or tag than by eyeballing a list of files to find the one you want. Gmail even takes this one step better, by automatically creating tags out of most of the words in an email.

So certainly you can create and use labels in Gmail to ‘file’ your messages and keep them organized. But it’s really not necessary, since all you have to do is type whatever you’re searching for into the search box at the top of your inbox. You’ll then get a list of all the messages that includes the words you typed.

Old habits are hard to break though, we’re all used to riffling through lists of files to find the one we want, rather than typing in some words in the search bar to find the right file, just like we did with that filing cabinet in the physical world (or searching for books in a library). As we started using computers and the virtual world, our computer filing systems weren’t very smart, they only used the filename for keyword indexing, so searching for a particular file was a lot harder. So we created folders to organize those files – made it easier on us to find things. Gmail’s ability to automatically index every email you’ve ever received or sent (with every word they have in them) make searching much more fruitful. You just have to force yourself to use the search bar until it becomes a habit.

Let’s say I’m looking in my Gmail for an email I got from “Sam”. I can’t remember exactly what it said, something about him wanting to talk to me about my car, and I think he said that he liked Volvo cars. I could simply type “Sam” into the search box and get every email that Sam ever sent me, but if I added the word ‘Car’ and ‘Volvo’ I’d probably only get exactly the email I was looking for. That’s the way you use keywords, just pick out whatever words you remember were in the email and type them all into the search bar – the more words you can type in, the better likelihood you’ll get the email you want.

Certainly you can create a label “Sam” and another one “Car” and one for “Volvo” too, but that’s way too much work! When it comes to physical things, organizing like items together makes total sense (think labeled Tupperware!), but that doesn’t have to translate into the virtual world. When it comes to Gmail, doing so just gives you more work to do. So for someone using Gmail, I’d say try to abandon the old-style filing system and use the power of computing to search for what you want. It’s going to turn out to be a whole lot faster than eyeballing lists of emails, and will be way less work than creating labels.

But if you’re determined to replicate the folder system in Gmail, then the place you want to go is to ‘Manage Labels’ where you can create labels for whatever you’d like. Just click the gear icon at the top-right, which drops down a menu list. Click on Settings and then you’ll choose the second tab on the settings page ‘Labels’.

Once you’ve got your set of labels created, you can start assigning labels to emails. The simplest way is to first use the search tool on your inbox to get a list of all the emails you want to assign to one label, and then select all the items on that list (use the checkboxes at the left of the list). With selected emails, you’ll see some tool icons above the list. Choose either the ‘move to’ tool (looks like a file folder), or the ‘label’ tool (looks like a sales tag).

Feel free to leave a comment if you’d like more details about using Gmail.