You may or may not know that at Google, we use our own products internally. This includes e-mail and frankly, I don’t think I could manage the volume of email I get using anything but Gmail. Full disclosure: I am a label junkie. Not clothing labels but Gmail labels. My inbox would be a filthy mess without them. Let me give you some quick stats:

No I am not making this up. Yes, labels and filters are life savers. For example, I get a lot of emails that don’t require immediate attention from me. This is because I’m an information junkie. I’ve accepted and am OK with that. However, I need those emails to be out of the way so I can actually see the e-mails that require action on my part. Enter filters+labels. Here’s a quick rundown on how I do it (some of this may be email organization 101):

Step one: Identify source of email you’d like to filter. It could be from a specific email address, contain a certain word in the subject line, or sent to a specific mailing list.

Step two: Create filter based on source you’ve identified in step one.

Step three: Here’s where the magic happens. Decide what you want to have happen to the mail you are filtering. For things I don’t need to see, I prefer to Archive and Label. This gets the mail out of your Inbox but allows you to find it easily later. Don’t let my ideas limit you though, you can leave things right in your Inbox and label them, forward them to another email address automatically, delete it, star it, or any combination of the above.

That’s pretty much it. Wash, rinse, repeat for whatever other emails you’d like some automagictasticness applied to.

Suggestions:

• Automatically filtering, labeling, and starring emails that need things done with them fast (like bills). When you’ve acted on the email, you can unstar it.
• Never see silly forwards again (hello, how many times is Bill Gates going to give me money). Filter for has the word “fwd” and delete immediately. If deleting scares you (like me) you can archive immediately and delete as you see fit.

I hope this helps people get an understanding of how I use labels and filters in Gmail. If any readers have some cool labeling or filtering tricks they’ve come up with, I’d love to see them. Leave a comment or email me with them.