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Gmail basics: Why Google Email is Cool

March 17th, 2006 by Chuck Sharp

In this article, I’d like to discuss some of the things that gmail (Google’s webmail service) can do for you. First off though, if you don’t have a gmail account, go to mail.google.com to sign up. It will ask to send your phone a text message to make you go to a little trouble.

Gmail does email very well. It’s interface is simple but feature packed, and it’s efficient. It gives you almost 3 GB of storage space for your email. It also lets you use your favorite email program with it, which is quite unlike other web email services like hotmail and yahoo mail. It has a bunch of other great features as well.

Labels

To use the full power of gmail, you need to understand the concepts of labels and archiving. Gmail doesn’t use the traditional folder approach that most email systems use. You don’t file away emails into folders with gmail. Instead, you apply descriptive labels to emails. One of my gmail accounts has labels like Newsletter, ChuckTheGeek, Family, etc. To create a simply click “Edit Labels” on the left side of the gmail interface. Type in the name of the label you want to create in the text box, and press the “Create” button. When you’re in the inbox, you can apply a label to an email by selecting it (put a check mark next to it), click on the drop-down box right that says “More actions…”, and then select the label you want to apply. You’ll notice the label now appears in the subject line of that email.

Why are labels better than folders? The simple answer is that you can apply as many labels as you want to any email. This is much more useful than it sounds. Let’s say you enjoy scrapbooking as a hobby. You may have the labels “Family”, “Scrapbooking”, “Newsletter”, “Scrapbooking Ideas”, etc. When your sister forwards you an email of a scrapbooking newsletter, you can apply all of those labels. Later, when you’re looking for some ideas, You can look under the Scrapbooking Ideas label. If you want to see all of the email between you and your sister, you can look under family. And so on. Again, this is much more useful than it sounds. Another nice thing about labels is that you can apply a label and still have the email listed in your inbox. This appeals to the organizational freak in me. Email comes in, label it for organization, and then read it! I love it.

Archiving

Now, this will let you sort and categorize your email. But what about getting it out of your inbox? That’s what archiving is for. When you select an email and press the “Archive” button, all that it does is take that email out of the inbox. You can still find it under the “All Mail” link on the left side of the gmail screen, by searching for it, or under any labels it has assigned to it. Between labels and archiving, you can organize your email quite effectively.

Filters

The next thing to discuss is filters. This is the powerhouse of gmail productivity. With a good filter set up, you can have email automatically labeled, archived, forwarded, and/or deleted, all based on the email’s sender, subject, recipient, or message content. To create a filter, click on the “Create a filter” link at the top center of the gmail window. Then fill out whatever you need to on the search criteria. This tells gmail what to look for. For example, I have a newsletter sent to me from David Allen, the Getting Things Done guy. So I’ve created a filter with “David Allen” in the From text box. When you press the “Next Step >” button, you can pick out what to do with any emails that match your criteria. I’ve chose to apply the Newsletter label and nothing else. This way, it’s already labelled before I get to it, but it still shows up in my inbox so I see it.

One important not is that you only get something like 20 filters. In practice this isn’t a problem because you can combine multiple search criteria for one set of actions. Here’s what I mean: I get several email newsletters, and I want them all to be treated the same, that is, they get labelled and then left alone in the inbox until I can read them. So, in the previous example, I can take that From text box, and put something like this in it:

techsupportalert.com OR “David Allen” OR “Dan Miller”

Then, anything that comes in from one of those addresses/names gets labelled as a newsletter.

“Plus” Filtering and Spam

The last thing to talk about is the plus (+) sign. Let’s say your email address is cooldude@gmail.com. Normally, you’d have email sent to that email address as is. However, you can modify it a little bit. You can send email to cooldude+anything.you.want.here@gmail.com. You’ll still get the email! Gmail ignores everything after the plus sign. Now, this sounds like a stupid trick with no purpose. Boy oh boy, there are so many uses for this.

You can create a filter that looks for certain recipients, right? So, here’s a quick but highly useful example. Create a filter that filters against the recipient cooldude+nospamfromyou@gmail.com (of course, change “cooldude” to your correct username), and have this filter label the email as a label like “possible junk” and archive it. Next time you need to give your email address to a website, give “cooldude+nospamfromyou@gmail.com”. Any email it sends you will be labelled and archived automatically! Cool, huh?