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Organizing your Gmail

Over time, you may receive thousands of emails, and trying to find a certain email can become a difficult task. That is why it is important to organise your emails so you can easily find important ones in the future. Below are some useful features to help organize all your emails and contacts.

Contacts

There are several ways to add and organize your contacts. Click on the “Contacts”

button on the left hand corner bar and you will be taken to a page like this:

One very useful thing about Gmail is that you don’t really have to add your contacts by hand in the long run. Gmail will automatically add the emails of everyone you replied to or have written to. Gmail will, by default, show you initially the most used contacts you have. To view contacts that don’t appear on that list, either use the search feature or click on the button that says “All”.

By clicking on the single little person with a + sign on the upper left hand side, you can add individual contacts.

By clicking on the multiple little people with a plus sign, also on the upper left hand side, you can create a group. You can move several people to each group, so when you need to email them you don’t need to select them one by one.

For example, when I am working on a project with a certain number of people, I create a group called “Project Whatever Name” and add to it all the people who are part of that project. That way, when I need to send them all an email, all I need to do is select that group on the email address field and they will all receive the email. You will notice that Gmail has already created a few groups for you if you decide to use them. They are the “Friends”, “Family” and “Coworkers” groups you see to your eft of the screen.

On the upper right hand corner you will notice the import and export buttons. You can import your contacts formatted as CSV files from Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Eudora and some other apps. Gmail also supports importing vCard from apps like Apple Address Book.

The Export button is used if you want to do the opposite, export all of your contacts to use in another program or as a back up. You can also print contact information if you prefer the hard copy.

Gmail will also help you manage your duplicate contacts by merging them or removing old contacts.

You can also click on someone’s name and view all your recent conversations you have had, which means, you can see all the emails you exchanged recently. You can also do that simply by searching for the email address or the name of a contact on the search bar on the main screen.

Stars

Stars function in Gmail as a way of marking emails that you would like to pay attention to. You can star an email simply by clicking on the little star icon on the left hand side of any email when on inbox preview. When you decide to look for them again, you can simply click on the “Starred’ button and it will retrieve all the emails you have chosen to mark with a star.

Labels

Labels are a much more elaborate way of organizing your emails. They work in a very similar manner to folders in other email clients. You can create labels by clicking on the button on top of the messages that says “Labels” and selecting “Manage Labels”. You will then be taken to a page that lets you manage all of your labels, whether you want to show them or hide them from the left side menu, and the option to delete them or create new ones.

When you decide to add an email to a particular label, simply check the box next to that email, go to the label pull down and check the label you want to be assigned to that email. Much like the stars, or folders, if at point you want to view only emails that have that label, click on the name of the label on the left hand side menu and all the emails you have attached that label to will appear.

You can also “mute” an email. Let’s say you signed up for a mailing list, you want to receive, so they are not spam, but they send emails so frequently that you don’t want to see it popping up all the time. Well, you can go to “more actions” and select “Mute” or simply type the letter “m” when reading one of the emails, and from then on, all emails coming from that group will bypass the inbox and go directly to archive, where you can find them when you do want to read the messages.