Paul McFedries - G Suite For Dummies

The main menu's label list contains five labels by default: Inbox, Starred, Snoozed, Sent, and Drafts. To see more labels, click More to expand the list and see all your labels, as shown in Figure 2-19. To contract the label list, click Less.

FIGURE 2-18:Select Nest Label Under and then select the parent label.

FIGURE 2-19:Click More in the label list to see all your labels.

If you have a few important labels that you use frequently, it's a pain if those labels appear only in the expanded label list, because you have to click More to get at them. Forget that. Here's how to cajole Gmail into always displaying a label above the More command:

1 Choose Settings ⇒ See all settings and then click the Labels tab.Gmail gives you two other ways to get to the Labels tab:Select any message and then choose Label ⇒ Manage Labels.Click More in the main menu's label list running down the left side of the screen, and then click Manage Labels near the very bottom of the expanded list.The Labels tab displays a complete list of the predefined Gmail labels (these are in the System Labels section) and your custom labels (which you'll find in the Labels section).

2 If you want a label to appear above the More command in the label list, click that label's Show link.Alternatively, if you want the label to appear above the More command only if the label has one or more unread messages, click the label's Show If Unread link. (Note that the Show If Unread link is available only for some labels, including all your custom labels.)If a label already appears above the More link, you can remove it by clicking its Hide link.

Earlier, I talked about archiving a message, which means that Gmail moves the message to the All Mail label. That's a simple way of decluttering your inbox, but there's a problem: If you receive another message in the archived conversation, Gmail de-archives the entire conversation and plops everything back into the inbox. Sometimes that de-archiving behavior is exactly what you want, but what if you really are done with a particular conversation and don't want to see any more messages?

When an email conversation has lost its luster (assuming it had any luster to begin with), then rather than archive the conversation, you need to mute it. When you mute a conversation, Gmail moves the original message out of your inbox and into the All Mail label, but it keeps the conversation there, no matter how many new messages pour in. Ah, silence!

If that sounds like bliss to you, you can mute a conversation by selecting it, clicking More (the three vertical dots), and then clicking Mute.

If needed, you can always restore a silenced conversation to your inbox by opening the All Mail label, selecting the muted conversation, clicking More (the three vertical dots), and then clicking Unmute.

If an email conversation has gone off on a tangent that no longer interests you or is useful to you, muting (as I described in the previous section) is the right strategy for keeping that conversation from clogging your inbox. However, sometimes you might want to remove a conversation from your inbox only temporarily. For example, if you're busy, you might not want a conversation's frequent notifications interrupting your train of thought.

You can remove a conversation temporarily from your inbox by using Gmail's handy Snooze feature, which sends the conversation to bed until a date and time you specify. The conversation is still available in the Snoozed label, should you need to check in.

To snooze a conversation, follow these steps:

1 Select the conversation's check box.

2 Click Snooze.Gmail displays the Snooze Until dialog box, which looks an awful lot like the one shown in Figure 2-20. FIGURE 2-20:Use the Snooze Until options to set an end time for the conversation's nap.

3 If you see a date and time that works for you, click it and skip the rest of this procedure.

4 Click Select Date and Time.Gmail opens the Select Date and Time dialog box, which offers a calendar and a time text box.

5 Use the calendar to select the date on which you want the snooze period to end.

6 Use the text box to enter the time you want the snooze to end.

7 Click Save.Gmail makes a note to restore your conversation on the date and time you specified.

To wake up a snoozed conversation, open the Snoozed label, select the snoozed conversation, click Snooze, and then click Unsnooze.

There's a good chance you have a scarily large number of email messages squirreled away in Gmail's nooks and crannies. Even if you've moved messages out of your inbox and into one or more labels, deleted messages you don't want, and reported all that spam, finding a particular message is often a real needle-in-a-haystack exercise. Fortunately, Gmail comes with a power Search tool that can help you quickly and easily find any message anywhere it's located within Gmail.

You search Gmail using the big Search Mail text box at the top of the page. You can use one of these two methods:

Use the text box to enter some text. It can be a word, part of a word, or a phrase that matches the content of the message you want to find. As you type, Gmail works in the background, looking for emails that match, and then displays those matches in a list. (See Figure 2-21.) When you see the message you want, click it.

Click Show Search Options. The options are pointed out in Figure 2-21, which gets you face-to-face with the dialog box shown in Figure 2-22. Use one or more of the fields to enter the criteria for the message or messages you want to locate, and then click Search.

FIGURE 2-21:When you enter search text into the Search Mail text box, Gmail displays a list of messages that match.

FIGURE 2-22:Click Show Search Options to use this dialog box for more targeted searches.

One reason that email dominates everyone’s lives is that it requires so much maintenance: moving, archiving, labeling, starring, forwarding, deleting, and on and on. Take applying labels, for example. In theory, labeling messages is a great way to keep your email organized, but it soon becomes a chore to apply labels to the majority of your messages.

However, you might have noticed that labeling and other email chores feel burdensome partly because you repeat the same task over and over. However, that repetitiveness is actually good news because it means that you can foist some of the work on Gmail. Specifically, you can create a filter that looks for messages that meet certain criteria and then runs one or more actions on any messages that match, such as applying a label, starring, or deleting.