How to tame your Gmail inbox with labels – The Verge

Let’s face it: If you use your gmail account for more than occasional communication with friends and family, it’s probably getting out of control. Between work-related emails, online events, invites, advertisements from your favorite retailers, and just plain spam, you’ll find it hard to keep track.

There are a variety of ways to organize your email, and one powerful option is to apply labels, the gmail analog, to folders. putting labels on emails makes them easier to manage. for example, you can tag all the people you need to send Christmas greetings to; everyone who expressed an interest in purchasing his graphic novel collection; everyone working on your current video project; everyone you met in college – the possibilities are almost endless.

here are some basic concepts and strategies for using gmail’s tag features. Please note that they are all done on a desktop computer; There are different ways to manage tags on a mobile device, which I’ll cover at the end of this article.

create tags

To start using tags, the first thing you need to do is create some. there are a couple of ways you can do it.

first, you can create a label from the left column of gmail:

• in the left column, scroll down from the inbox to “manage labels” and “create new label”. (you may need to click “more” to see it).
• click “create new tag” and enter the name of your new tag. you can nest it under an existing tag if you wish.

You can also create a new label and immediately apply it to several emails:

• select the emails you want to label by checking the boxes to the left of the emails. when ready, right-click.
• hover over “label as”. you can type the name of your new tag in the popup field and hit the return key, or click “create new” where you can enter the name of your new tag and nest it under an existing tag if you want .

Color your labels

One of the simplest things you can do with labels in gmail is give them colors. It may seem like a small thing, but if you’re browsing your email, the colored labels make it immediately clear which category an email belongs to.

To assign colors to a Gmail label:

• hover over the tag name in the left column.
• click the three dots to the right of the tag name.
• hover over “label color.”
• select the color you want to assign to that label, you can choose a basic color scheme or create custom colors for the background and text.

If you want to go back to the default colors (black text on a gray background), click on “Remove color.”

automatically apply labels to incoming emails

You can automatically apply labels to emails as they arrive. For example, if you were planning to write a story about different types of face masks and wanted to tag any emails that might be related to that topic, you could set up a filter. which would automatically put the “mask” label on those emails. like this:

• first, create the tag you want. in this case, i used the instructions above to create the “skins” tag.
• go to your gmail search box. click the “show search options” symbol on the far right of the search box.
• place your search term in the appropriate fields. for example, to create my search, I will search for any email that contains the word “mask”. I can also apply it to emails that end up in my inbox (so I don’t tag any emails that end up as spam) by clicking the field next to “search” and selecting “inbox” from the dropdown. menu.

• Click on the “Create filter” button.
• You’ll then be brought to a page that lets you choose what you want the filter to do. For example, I could have the filtered emails immediately deleted or archived, marked as important (or as not important), or forwarded to another address, among other options. In this case, I’m going to check the box next to “Apply the label:” and then choose the label “Masks” from the drop-down menu. (You can also create a new label here, if you wish.)

• This will only label future emails. To apply the label to current emails as well, also check “Also apply filter to matching conversations” which appears at the bottom of the checklist. (Note: This last one is a somewhat quirky feature, so it may not work in all cases.)
• Click “Create filter.”

edit your filters

If you wish to edit or remove any of your filters, you must do so through the main gmail settings page, accessed by clicking the gear in the top right corner and then “view all settings” . then:

• click on the “filters and blocked addresses” tab.
• you will see a list of all your filters. to edit or delete one individually, click the “edit” or “delete” links to the right of each tag.
• you can also delete or export a group of tags by checking them and then clicking the links “export” or “remove” at the end of the list.

show or hide your tags

When you have a lot of tags they can be overwhelming, so gmail has ways you can show or hide specific tags.

If you click on “manage labels” in the left column, you will be taken to the “labels” tab on the gmail settings page. scroll down the resulting page to find a list of all your tags.

There are two ways to set whether a tag is visible: “show in tag list” and “show in message list”. “label list” refers to the list of your labels in the left column of gmail; is useful because you can click on the name of a specific tag to find all emails with that tag. here in the settings, you can choose to show that label in the list on the left, hide it, or only show it if you have unread emails with that label.

“show in message list” allows you to show or hide the label in the main message window; in other words, you won’t see the tag next to the first line(s) of the email. however, the email will still be tagged.

And finally, you can edit each label or remove it entirely. (Removing it will not delete the email, just the label.)

manage tags on a mobile device

While Gmail labels must be created on a computer and more complex operations must also be performed on a computer, you do have some options for how labels are used on your mobile device.

to manually add a tag to an email:

• on either an iphone or android phone, open the email you want to tag.
• tap the three dots icon at the top right of the screen.
• select “change labels”.
• select (or deselect) the labels you want to apply to that message.

you can add tags to more than one email at a time:

• In your email list, tap the icon to the left of each message you want to label. the icon will change to a check mark.
• tap the three dots icon in the top right corner of the screen.
• select “change labels”.
• select the label you want to apply to those messages.

You can also do some basic tag management on a mobile device, but what you can do depends on whether you’re using ios or android.

to manage your tags on an iphone:

• tap the three line hamburger icon in the top left corner.
• scroll down and select “settings”.
• tap the gmail account you want modify.
• scroll down and select “tag settings”.
• select the tag you want to set.
• tap “add…” if you want to add that tag to future messages. you can specify a number of factors, such as who it’s from, the subject, for whom, and words to include or exclude.
• You can also tap “name” to rename the tag. or “remove <tag name>” to remove the tag.

on an android device:

• tap the three line hamburger icon in the top left corner.
• scroll down and select “settings”.
• tap the gmail account you want modify.
• scroll down and select “manage tags”.
• on an android device, the only thing you can really adjust is whether your mobile device will sync tags with your computer . the page after “manage tags” lists all the categories that google included (like main, social, etc.), and after that, all your tags. it also shows if the categories/tags have been synced.
• If you want to sync your tags, scroll down to the tag name and tap on it.
• tap “sync messages”. no messages will be downloaded, but that tag’s app will be synced to the appropriate messages. you can choose to apply the labels to messages that have arrived in the last 30 days or to all messages.
• Once you’ve checked the label to sync, you can choose whether to receive a notification on your phone every time a message with that tag appears.

update Jul 26, 2021 5:00 PM m. et: Updated to replace an outdated screenshot showing how to apply tags.