How to manage labels in gmail.

You may be surprised to notice that Gmail doesn’t allow you to create folders to store your emails in.

Instead, Gmail uses a Labels system.

A conversation can have as many labels applied to it as you like, which can be better for organizing that the folders system…

since with folders each conversation could only exist in one folder.

By default, Gmail has a number of different Labels that can be applied to your conversations, such as Inbox, Sent Mail and Important. Some of these are System Labels, while others are Custom Labels.

Each custom label has a drop down menu to its name, providing you with a quick way to edit its properties.

Here, you can add or remove a color to a label, allowing you to visually identify conversations. You can also rename, hide or delete a custom label.

Select a a color to tell Gmail to assign it for this label.

To hide a label, click the drop down arrow next to it, and select Hide.

Notice that the Personal label no longer shows up in our left menu, as it is now hidden.

To find the hidden label in the menu, click the More labels drop down link.

Now you can see all other labels that have been marked as hidden.

Let’s unhide the Personal label.

From here you can Manage labels or Create new labels using the links at the bottom.

You can also manage labels from the Settings menu.

Click the Wheel icon drop down menu, and then click Settings.

Click the Labels tab.

System labels are at the top… and they cannot be removed. All system labels except for the Inbox can be shown or hidden.

Let’s show the Spam label. Click its show link.

Notice that Spam is now visible in the main menu.

At the bottom is where the custom labels are listed. From here you can show them, hide them, or remove them altogether.

Let’s remove the Travel label by clicking the remove link.

Note that removing a label will not delete the messages with that label. Message that have no labels will still show up under All emails.

To rename a custom label , simply hover over its title and click into the text field that appears.

To finish editing the label, click outside the edit box, or just press Enter.

The labels will automatically re-sort in alphabetic order.

Click Create new label to create the Travel label again.

We’ll also show the Receipts label… click it’s show link.

To finish, let’s scroll up and examine our changes.

As you can see, all of the changes we made on this page took effect immediately.

This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to manage labels in Gmail.