Manage Labels in Gmail

Google’s Gmail service bills itself as an intuitive, innovative way of organizing e-mail. One of the more useful concepts you may encounter in Gmail is the use of labels. Labels are much like tags on a blog post. They allow you to quickly access and sort through related information. Unlike a folder-based system in which each file or message can only be located in one folder, you can apply more than one label, and thus more than one reference, to each e-mail message. This article walks you through the basic steps to manage labels in Gmail.

Steps

Create a Gmail Account

  1. Open a Gmail account or log in to your existing Gmail account via http://mail.google.com/.

Select Labels

  1. Click the empty box next to any Gmail conversations you’d like to label or change labels on. A check mark should appear in each box.

Add a New Label

  1. Click the “Labels” button in your Gmail toolbar. This will provide a pull-down menu.
  2. Select a label. Use either one of the default labels provided (Work, Personal, Receipts, Travel) or select “Create New” to enter your own. Once you’ve selected a label, it will be applied to all selected conversations. Any new labels created will then be available under the “Labels” pull down menu for future use, along with the defaults.

Remove Labels

  1. Select a labeled conversation.
  2. Click on the “Labels” button in your Gmail toolbar.
  3. Click on the checked box next to the label you’d like to remove.
  4. Select “Apply.”

Edit or Remove Labels

  1. Access the label you’d like to edit or remove via the pull-down list of labels on the left side of your Gmail display. If the label you’re looking for isn’t displayed as a clickable link, you’ll find it underneath the “(#) more” heading, where (#) is the number of additional labels not being displayed.
  2. Click the down arrow to the left of the label. This supplies a menu that allows you to hide, rename or delete labels. You can also use this menu to add color to labels.

Display Labels

  1. Use the “Hide” option, accessed through the pull-down menu to the left of the labels in the left-hand Gmail display, to remove labels from the default list on the left of your screen and hide them under the “(#) more” display instead. This will not hide labels on your Gmail conversations.
  2. Click and drag hidden labels from underneath the “(#) more” display to the default label display if you’d like them to be readily visible once again.

Manage Labels

  1. Manage labels in mass quantities by clicking the “Labels” button in your Gmail toolbar and then selecting “Manage Labels.” This will pull up a menu featuring all of your current Gmail labels, with “Hide” and “Show” buttons next to each label. Most labels will also have a “Remove” button next to them, and can be edited by left-clicking on the label name.



Tips

  • Note that there are some default “System Labels” used to organize your messages, and these cannot be removed. These system labels include Inbox, Sent Mail and Drafts.
  • In Gmail, e-mail messages sent back and forth between you and another person are collected together, much like index cards in an index card holder. This collection of related e-mails is referred to as a conversation, and a label applied to one message in a conversation will be applied to the entire conversation.

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Sources and Citations

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