Google Your Life (3): Gmail (Ep.2)

Continuing with our email star: Gmail. I mentioned general information about it. I also described how its page is organized. In this post I'll talk about how email messages are organized in Gmail. In this concern, there are some terms:

• Inbox
• Archive
• Labels
• Star

Between Inbox and Archive

Any email has folders that are used to organize and group messages. Inbox, Sent Items, Spam (Bulk), Drafts, and Trash can are special folders that user cannot modify. Other than that, user can create his user folders where he can organize messages. Message can be put only in one folder.

This concept is different in Gmail:

• Messages are stored in one of two primary places: Inbox, and Archive, except some special cases I'll mention later.
• Any received message is stored in Inbox (if not filtered).
• User can archive a message, so it hides from Inbox and move to Archive.
• To show all messages (in Inbox and Archive), you click All Mail in the upper left nav.

For the first moment, you will think that it's an unorganized email. But wait, I'll tell you how you can organize email in the next section. So no filders, it's only those two places.

Some special cases are:

• Sent emails appear only in Sent Mail and All Mail.
• If a sent message has a reply, it appears in inbox as a conversation.
• Spam messages appear only in Spam.
• Deleted messages appear in Trash.
• Gmail site says that you don't need to delete any message. Just Archive any unwanted message, so you can refer ro it through search.

Labels

That is new. Labels are used in instead of folders. For folders, messages are moved to only one folder, and so hides from the old one. This concept treats Inbox as a folder.For Gmail, labels are different:

• You apply labels to the message while it remains in its place (Inbox or Archive).
• You can apply more than one label to the message as you want to organize.
• Applied labels appears in the message board before the title of the message, in small green font.
• If the message is in Inbox, you can let it there, or just Archive it.
• To access messages that has a specific label, you can access labels in the Labels box (the green bordered box in the left nav). It seems like folders. You can find a message in two different places.
• You can Archive labled messages to clean-up your Inbox.

Starred

You can sign messages with stars in their places by clicking the white star on the left of the sender of the message. A yellow star will apear. You can identify important messges in their places by stars. You can access all starred messages from different places through the Starred section.

Next post, I'll talk about how I practically use my Gmail according to these new concepts.