Some ways to organize your emails from Gmail
Introduction
You can find different ways to manage your emails on the Internet. The idea of this article is not to offer you “the right way to do it”, but rather to share my experience. Moreover, if you had other ideas or particular remarks, feel free to share your thoughts on this article. Email management is a known issue, especially when you receive a lot of emails.
That’s why Google offers several solutions that are implemented natively in order to help you managing your emails as well as possible. You probably already know many of the tips I will list, but I think a little reminder can never hurt.
Conversation mode
“Conversation Mode” is activated automatically as soon as your account is created so you probably never really paid attention to it. It allows you to gather every answer from the same subject in one global email. You can activate or deactivate it in your settings.
Then in on the “General” tab
Labels and Filters
Labels
Another great classic tool for managing your emails is adding one or more labels to an email or an email conversation. Once labelled your emails will be grouped on your left sidebar and can be customized with colors and organized into sub labels.
In the conversation thread the labels will be indicated in the body of the email.
In this example, the email is associated with the labels “Clients”, “Client 1”, “CR” and “Idean”. The main interest for creating sub-labels is to be able to do research at different levels.
For example, I will be able to find this email by clicking directly on the “CR” labels (from Clients/Customer 1 (label:clients-client-1-cr) or “Idean” (label:idean) on the sidebar.
We can already notice that this allows you to find an email by different kinds of labels. For this example, I was looking for all the “CR” (content report) of the meeting with “Clients 1”.
Gmail also allows you to search on several labels:
There are different ways to create labels:
- In the Gmail settings
- While reading the email
- Automatically and using filters. I will detail this part below in the article.
In this example, you can see that I have created a “HOT” label for all the hot topics that I want to keep under the radar.
There are other ways to highlight certain types of labels. For example, you can display them at the top of your email list using the “Inbox Sections”.
Here displayed in 2nd position just after the “unread” ones
This helps to highlight the important topics.
The filters
In order to make your life easier, it is often very useful to use filters to automatically attribute labels to your emails. For example, all emails from a certain customer can be tagged on the fly before they are even read. To do this you will need to go to the settings and associate requests to your filters.
Here are some links:
Save URLs
You should know that the url of an email or a conversation will allow you to re-open a topic very quickly. Until then, I used to save conversation urls (in project files for example) in order to re-open topics that I had identified as important.
Use Tasks
This trick may not be as known yet it can be extremely useful. For some time now, Gmail has been integrating modules on the right side bar. Otherwise, the modules present are “Agenda”, “Keep” and “Tasks”.
Associated with Gmail this takes on a rather interesting dimension. The “Tasks” module allows you to retrieve the URL of the conversation and associate it with a list or category (e.g. the name of a customer). To do this you have to create a task directly from the body of the email:
- Step 1: Select the list associated with the email you want to add
- Step 2: Create the tasks
- Step 3: Set up the task
Clicking on the link opens the associated email.
Conclusion
There are many other ways to organize your emails. I mainly focused on the ones that I know does not require installing plugins or other additional paid services. Anyway, I hope that this article will allow you to manage your emails under Gmail.
