I was just searching for some cool features of different web based email services when Gmail’s features caught my attention. Organising your Gmail account is really amazing if you put an eye on full fledged functionality that Gmail provides.

Labeling emails

Gmail offers labeling to file your emails. These labels work just like folders. You can create as many labels as you wish for a single email. To assign a label to your message just select it and go to More Actions where you can assign a label to the message. Also, new labels can be created in Labels tab of Settings option. Whenever you want to access emails with a particular label, just go to the Labels Box at the left-side of main page of your Gmail account, click on the required label and all your emails with that label are presented before you.

Also you can color the labels according to your wish. As colored labels catch your attention easily, thus spotting a message in a list of many emails becomes very easy.

If all the emails are labeled, locating ‘em in future is very easy. Just go to Labels box and find the appropriate label.

Filtering Options

Incoming messages with specific characteristics can be filtered for automatic processing by Gmail e.g. you can auto-delete messages from a particular sender without paying heed to it, label incoming messages from a mailing list as Read Later, automatically forward e-mail from your friend to your cell phone, or star messages from an important contact. In order to do this just go to Settings option, click on Filters tab to set the search criteria, preview the results, and tell actions to be taken by Gmail.

Search Options

What if you haven’t labeled any of your messages but want to search a particular email from your email archive?? Quite cumbersome, ain’t that?? Thanks to the advanced search option that Gmail provides to search emails from your email archives. Just like you search with ordinary Google search engine, Gmail also supports similar type of queries to search your emails e.g. if you want to search an email from your friend “XYZ” with subject of “Hello World” then you will type into the search box, from:”XYZ” subject:”hello world”, ( Quotation marks make a query more descriptive).

To see search emails from everyone with a specific domain say  @abc.com except from your friend BOB you will type from:abc.com AND -from:bob@abc.com. Gmail’s search operators can be used for more advanced options.

Personal Level Indicators

In order to check whether an email was sent only to you or a large group, you need to turn on the Personal Level Indicators from General tab under Settings. Messages sent to you only show a double arrow ( >>) before the subject line. Messages sent to you and others get a single arrow(>). Messages sent to a mailing list show no arrows at all.

Import emails from your other accounts( different domains )

To enable Gmail as your master email service, just configure it to import emails from non Gmail email accounts. Simply go to Accounts tab in Settings and do it there. Also, if you want to reply via one of those other accounts right from Gmail( i.e. you don’t want others to notice that you are replying from Gmail), configure this in Accounts tab.