Organising & Sorting Mail

Archiving messages can help you in a few ways.

Notably:

•  It helps you keep a clean house by moving mail out of your inbox without deleting it.
• If you apply a label to a message before you archive it, you can access that message from the label. In this sense, archiving can help labels function more like folders.

Remember, you can still find any messages you archive - whether or not they're also in a particular label - by clicking All Mail or in the related  search results.

Labels

 

 You can create labels and apply them - manually or automatically - in order to group related messages together. Lets say you want to keep messages from you Institution all in one place. If you have a message from them already, just check the box next to your message in you inbox.

 

Create a label for their messages:

• Select Create new from the Labels drop-down menu (or type'I' if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled)
• Enter a name for you Label
• Click OK

The name of you label will appear just before the subject line.

 

• You can find all your messages that have this label attached by clicking the label's name on the left of any Gmail page; if you have a lot of labels, you may have some hidden by default. In that case, just click the down-arrow at the bottom of your labels list to see a full list of all your labels, or click Manage Labels if you'd like to make sure that a label isn't hidden.

At this point, you can click Archive; the message will disappear from your inbox, but will remain listed when you click the 'Institution' label, or All Mail. You can also still search for your archived messages. All you're doing when you archive a message is helping to keep the Inbox clutter down. You can also label and archive messages in one fell swoop by using the Move to drop-down menu.

Filters

If you don't want to mark all your messages from Institution one-by-one, you can set up a filter. The filter will detect when your Institution emails you, and automatically applies the 'Institution' label (and if you'd like, you can send the message straight to the Institution section and skip the Inbox). To do so, just follow these steps:

1. Open a message from your Institution
2. From the More Actions drop-down menu, select Filter messages like these
3. In the 'From:' field, enter your Institutions email address
4. Click Next Step>
5. Check the Apply the label: box and select Institution from your Choose label... drop-down menu (you might also want to apply some of the other options, like Skip the Inbox, which will send their messages straight to the Institution section and keep the Inbox clean).
6. If you'd like to add the label to existing messages as well as future ones, select the Also apply filter to xconversations below checkbox.
7. Click Create Filter.