Labels to Organize Your Mail - Gmail Tutorial Pt. 2

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In the first part of this tutorial, I told you how to add all your accounts to Gmail to manage them all in one place. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use labels to organize mail from different accounts. In the next part, I’ll tell you how to use filters, with some practical examples.

What Are Labels?

Labels are just like tags, to identify different items. They’re similar to ‘colour coding’. Labels can be very helpful to organize all your email and to group those from the same account, for better management.

Labels are to Gmail what folders are to other email services. However, labels allow for better organization: you can assign multiple labels to a single email(or ‘conversation’, as it’s called in Gmail), and you can even colour code different labels, for easy identification.

Let’s Label

Remember in the last tutorial I had told you to check ‘Label incoming messages’? If you did, a label is automatically created for that particular email address. If you did not, no problem. Go to Settings –> Accounts, and in the ‘Get mail from other accounts’ box, you’ll see the email addresses you added. To add a label to one email address, click on edit info next to the email address. Then, check ‘Label incoming messages’. If you want to create a new label other than the default (email address based one), and click ‘New label‘.

The Result

Now, when you see your inbox, you’ll see that all emails from that particular email address have been tagged with the label you specified:

Managing Labels

Gmail has a dedicated settings page for managing labels. Go to Settings –> Labels to view the label management page:

You can see there’s not much to work with here on the ‘Labels’ page. You can either remove or rename a lable, or create a new one. NOTE: It’s written on the page too, that if you delete a particular label, the emails associated with that label will not be deleted. They will simply be left ‘label-less’.

Let’s Colour!

Did you know you can even colour-code your labels? Anywhere in your Gmail account, look down the left sidebar, and find this:

Click on the boxes next to the email address, and choose a colour for that particular label. Hey presto, you now have coloured labels!

That’s It For Today

But in the next part of this series, which I hopefully hope to post tomorrow or even today, I’ll explain how you can use filters effectively to sort out your mail and reduce it to zero. I will even explain how to use Gmail to have your blog backups emailed to you (WordPress only). Stay tuned!

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