folders in gmail?

[paul wheaton]

I've been transitioning from yahoo mail to gmail.

It looks like gmail doesn't have folders ???

[Satish Chilukuri]

Yes GMail doesn't have folders. Instead it has labels

[Eric Pascarello]

Gmail does not have folders, it has labels. You can filter by label. I find it to be annoying!

Eric

[fred rosenberger]

nope. you have 'lables'. you can put as many labels on an email as you want, so you no longer have to decide "does this go in my 'JavaRanch' folder, or my 'Contact Information' folder. you can tag it with BOTH.

you then set up filters to say "show me all the JavaRanch tagged mails". That's kind of LIKE a folder...

You can also set up rules to automatically tag stuff. When you don't want to see the mail any more, you can 'archive' it, which removes it from the mail list, but it's still available to be filtered. Personally, I archive very little, since the filters and the searching seem to be so efficient.

it DOES, however, take some mental adjustment to get used to.
[ May 09, 2007: Message edited by: Fred Rosenberger ]

[Sonny Gill]

Originally posted by Fred Rosenberger:

you then set up filters to say "show me all the JavaRanch tagged mails". That's kind of LIKE a folder...

You don't need a filter for that.
Just find the Labels box on the left side, and click one of the labels, it shows You only the email tagged with that label.
To find email that has been tagged with more than 1 label, use the search box.
For example, searching for label:JavaRanch label romotion will show all emails tagged JavaRanch and Promotion.

I agree that it takes a little mental adjustment, but I found it so much better than using folders after I got used to it.

[Rohit Nath]

Now I have got so used to Gmail labels that I find it really anoying to use folders in my Outlook and keep deciding in which folder my mail shoud go!!!
Lables make my life simpler.
Cheers!

[paul wheaton]

I'm trying to figure out this "other mindset" ...

I get mailing list stuff that I want to ignore except maybe once or twice a week. With yahoo, I would have this stuff go to a folder. Then, when I have a moment, I would take a look.

What would be the other mindset here?

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Paul Wheaton:
I'm trying to figure out this "other mindset" ...

I get mailing list stuff that I want to ignore except maybe once or twice a week. With yahoo, I would have this stuff go to a folder. Then, when I have a moment, I would take a look.

What would be the other mindset here?

Setup a filter that has 1 or more labels applied to these incoming messages and tell it to Skip the Inbox (Archive it). Your labels turn bold with the number of unread messages to the right so you can see when you have new messages there. It's really not that different from folders except, as has been said, you can put many labels on a message versus putting that message in a single folder. I like labels better. There's quite a bit of blog chatter about this very thing if you google it.