Email organization woes

[genealogygirl]

So, I switched to gmail to remedy my spam problem, on the advice of you good folks. And, yeah, wow. Spam that gets through gmail is truly minimal. I end up with 100 or more spam messages each night, but it all goes into the spam folder

Comments

[kiwiria]

Just wondering, what can you do with folders that you can't do with the tags in gmail. I tag and archieve, so the emails are removed from my inbox and only show up under the selected tags, and to me that's the same as if I'd put them in a folder by that name. So I'm just curious what you feel is missing in order to hopefully point you in the right direction :-)

[sageofgodalming]

I assume you are referring to labels.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=6560

I can't see that you can implement subfolders - sure you can give things more than one label, but there doesn't seem to be anything to enforce that, for example, one label is 'inside' another. Maybe that doesn't matter.

[kiwiria]

Sorry, I've been spending too much time on goodreads, where it's called tags rather than labels.

You're right, you can't make anything similar to sub-folders. I agree that that does get frustrating from time to time.

[genealogygirl]

"only show up under selected tags" ------ this is the part that would be key to me.

If I want to see all the emails that I've tagged as Lexicon to be answered for example and *nothing else* ----- can I do that? I can I sort them by date? Let's just say that I remember something came in last Tuesday for Lexicon, but I didn't even read it. What then? In the folders system, I just go to that folder and scroll up to Tuesday and skim, then I can find it. Does that work with the labels/tag system? I guess I also don't know how to make it only show me all messages with a specific tag.

[kiwiria]

"only show up under selected tags" ------ this is the part that would be key to me.
That part is (fortunately) easy.

You label a post and archive it. That way it's gone from your inbox, and doesn't clutter it up.

On the left hand side of the window you'll see a menu headed "Labels" with a list of all the labels you've created. Just like with tags in LJ, if you click one of those labels, you'll see only the posts with that label - sort of like if you were in a folder.

Hope that makes sense, otherwise let me know, and I'll make you some screenshots :)