Labeling, moving, Archiving

Archived emails are filtered out of your inbox

Email is too important to lose, and inboxes are too stressful to keep filled. The key to inbox happiness lies in getting emails out of inboxes after the appropriate action has been taken. In the Notes and Outlook world of yesterday, the only actions available were deleting emails or storing them in folders. Gmail works with a third option: Archiving, which means something different.

In Gmail, archiving simply means removing an email from the inbox. Maybe "inbox" sounds new and "archive" sounds old, I don't know why they named it that way. But that's how it works. What's important to you is:

• You can archive any email you are done with. You do not need to move it to a folder.

• Emails in the "archive" do not go anywhere. They are just stop cluttering your inbox - exactly what you want.

• When searching, it does not matter if an email is in your inbox, sent or archived.

Archiving is the "normal" way of dealing with emails you are done with.

Labels work like post-its - or folders

Searching in Gmail is very good and very fast - so fast that studies have shown you never get the time back that you invest in labeling your content. If you would still like to squirrel away content, confusion ends here: Labels and folders in Gmail are the same thing, but you decide how they behave.

Do you need to use labels at all? If you find yourself clicking the label and pouring through emails listed there, it may make sense to use them. Or if you need to hand over all the emails related to a client engagement (do you really do that, ever?). If you are like most people, you probably already search - because search is so good. You just might spare yourself the labeling work.

"Move" is a strange shortcut

Emails have a "move" command, too. It works like this: Say you are looking at what you have labeled "Client X". The "move" command will replace that label with another one - "Client Y" perhaps. All other labels will be kept intact. So understand "move" as changing a label.

If you are in the labeling business, using "move" with mails in your inbox is handy because it replaces the inbox label (!) with a label of your choice. Labeling and archiving in one - very efficient!

There you have it - the archive is not a mysterious place, but merely everything but your inbox. And the cleverest invention to empty inboxes. If you want to, you can apply labels, even treat them like you would a folder. Moving emails substitutes one label for another. You probably don't need labels/folders at all, chances are you have not been using them for retrieval anyway.

This was a fundamental post, but necessary - the archive is mysterious for many people new to Gmail (and we mustn't forget that many people join your company every year and are new to our tools). Archiving and labeling is easily the number one question (closely followed by conversation view). If you are ready, subscribe and join me on Friday to empty your inbox. Thank you for reading!