Filters, labels and undo send – these are three of the handiest little Gmail features available, helping to organize your inundated inbox. Use filters to guide your emails like little homing pigeons into labels; which you can colour coordinate too! And then there is undo send…a godsend that I wish had been available when I had a Nokia 3310 back in 2001!
Labels and Filters
These are pretty easy to set up and go someway to keep your emails organised, particularly if your inbox looks anything like mine. You see I collect emails, I do this in the hope that one day they will be worth something. The thing is I receive a lot of emails, and occasionally I need to look back over them to see which deadline I missed last month. So I need to find them and find them quickly. The search feature in Gmail is grand, I guess, but has failed me on a couple of occasions, so enter the first of the three Gmail features the mighty label!
Organisation
The create label button is conveniently hidden at the bottom of the menu on the left-hand side of Gmail. It is almost as if Google doesn’t want you to use them at all. If you can muster willpower and strength, swing the mouse cursor over the left-hand side and scroll down. Create your label, with a name you have that suits the nature of the emails if will hold and give it a fancy colour. You can now move into your emails bulk, or if you are stuck in an airport like I am now, you can do it one by one.
Automated Tasks
The filters option sidles up quite nicely to the labels. Once you have located it, you will be presented with a settings interface that the developers of Windows 3.11 would have been embarrassed about. Once you get over the nostalgia of pressing the turbo button to get more speed out of your processor, you can add filters to incoming, and existing emails, so that they are sent automatically to the labels. How convenient! However, be careful as the emails may be sent to the labels without you reading them – this may have happened to me recently…
Undo the Past
Now to my favourite of the three Gmail features…Have you ever found yourself regretting hitting the send button? Well, wait no longer, for the magical undo send button has arrived! It is one that I relish using, more often than I care to admit out loud. Perhaps you could find a use for it after having written a scathing email to your boss/co-worker, only for regret to set in after you have clicked send. It has different timing features, 5, 10, 20 and 30 seconds so that you can adjust the time that you have before the undo send becomes unavailable. It is an invaluable tool and one that could potentially save your skin.