Labels to Organize Your Mail – Gmail Tutorial Pt. 2
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:
The red ‘labels’ identify mail from different addresses
Managing Labels
Gmail has a dedicated settings page for managing labels. Go to Settings –> Labels to view the label management page:
Not much to work with.
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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This is a nice resource for the newbie to Gmail. I sure could have used such an article when I first started using Gmail sometime ago. The labels thing really annoyed me, I’m used to it now though.
dwanye – you have to tame a beast to take advantage of it!
I don’t have the coloured labels option in my account! What is this? Do you have to activate it or something?
Amna – it’s in the sidebar, below the links to your Spam, Trash, etc
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
I have found gmail to be a nightmare. If I receive an e-mail that is a response to one of my e-mails (or to someone else’s e-mail), I do not have two e-mails in my Inbox . . . the original disappears and the new e-mail appears, with the other inside the new e-mail. It’s evidently saving by threads. You can do a word search, but you’ll never find the original e-mails. It’s horrible. Important e-mails keep disappearing. Maybe I hit some type of “sort” button that does this, but it’s an insane feature to begin with.
If I send an e-mail, receive two replies, then send another reply, I want two of those e-mails in my Sent box and the other two in my Inbox.
As I said, gmail has turned out to be a nightmare for me.
How does anybody ever get the time to organise emails, I have got to the point where i just dump it all in an archive folder every couple of months.
?In both figure and landscape ? I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly.? Van Gogh
why do the contents of my labels keep disappearing?
why have a feature that does not work?
why have a feature that does not work and qhich loses the contents of ant labels ALWAYS?
nice site I like and I sure to visit, well done
In SETTINGS > LABELS I’ve got SETTINGS > ALL MAIL set and in LABELS i have SHOW ALL selected.
My labels do not appear on messages in the INBOX that I have labelled and color coated.
When I started this a couple of years ago each message that I had labelled showed a colored label in the subject line. No more.
Is there a switch I have not found or what’s going on?
oh . . . that’s coded, not coated . . . sorry
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