10 indispensable Gmail ‘extra’ features I can’t live without
Categories of reception boxes, labels and filters
If you send and receive a lot of emails, the basic Gmail organization is not enough to keep you sorted and tidy – at least not without much manual efforts on your part. Fortunately, Gmail has advanced organizational features that can help automate a large part of this and keep you straight.
To start, there are categories of Gmail reception boxes to automatically sort your email by intention. These categories of reception boxes include social promotions, promotions and spam, and Gmail automatically treats incoming emails and have them in these categories for your convenience.
Beyond these categories, you also have labels. A label is like a personalized tag that allows you to manually categorize emails as you wish. Each label is like a folder, except that you can mark an email with as many different labels as you wish. The labels can be navigable in the left panel, and the labeling facilitates navigation and the search for emails per type. For example, you may have labels for receipts, invoices, work projects, different hobbies, etc.
Dave Parrack / IDG
A step further, you have filters. A filter is a personalized rule that you can create, which automatically does things to emails when it enters your reception box. To create a filter, click Show search options To the right of the search area, enter your search criteria, then click on Create a filter.
For example, you can create a filter that automatically applies a certain label to all emails with a certain word in the object line, or you can automatically transfer emails to a different reception box if they come from a specific domain address.
