Gmail label tricks
Via lifehacker, I ran into this tip from White’s of Henry Lane.
Here’s the deal. Assuming you’ve got a gmail account (feel free to leave a comment if you need one), you can pre-sort email messages to yourself simply by adding a plus sign (+) and a label name to the end of your gmail user name.
- First create a new filter for "ideas" in gmail. Make the filter skip the inbox and go directly to archives. While you’re at it, create a new "ideas" label as well.
- Next test out your new trick by sending yourself an email to your gmail account with the "ideas" label tagged onto it (ie, user.name+ideas@gmail.com). You can test this by sending the message from any email account, not just gmail.
- If everything worked fine, you should have one new message waiting for you in your "ideas" label.
- Assuming it worked, you can now set up an ActiveWords action, or other macro kinda thing to fire up a new email to your new label whenever you want to drop an idea in there.
At White’s of Henry Lane, he suggests a whole bunch of other labels you can use, including ‘notes’, ‘blessings’, and even ‘YayMe’ (a great idea for keeping those Yay Me bits).
This is such a great little hack that I wanted to use it at work too, but apparently our Exchange server doesn’t like the extra stuff on the end of the username. Guess I’ll be sticking with gmail for this one…
UPDATE: Andrew just posted a workaround for the Outlook deal. I’ve actually had great success with this method in the past, but your mileage may vary.
I’ve tried your trick on my mail accounts at hotmail.com and mac.com. Doesn’t seem to work.
Hotmail refuses the email. Mac.com, accepts the e-mail, but the mail remains in the inbox.
If your offer is still valid, I’d be happy to give gmail a try. Thanks.
I completely forgot where I got the “yay me” idea from! I’m sorry, I’m going to go edit that story to point back to you!
Credit where credit is due!
Oh no! That means my wife can send tasks directly into my todo label!
How does one get a gmail account these days?
Excellent tip. Thank you.
Brandon:
http://lifehacker.com/software/email-apps/gmail-its-not-who-you-know-032682.php
Neat trick. The only subtle thing that doesn’t really work for me is that as a general rule nobody has ‘+’ in their email address and therefore my fingers are not trained to go for that key easily. Thus there’s a mental pause (no matter how slight) before making that email happen.
What I’d already done, which is a little messier but works just as well, is to setup a rule looking for TODO to start a subject line, and then do the necessary label/filter. Same idea.
if your gmail accout are so long like mine,such error will prompt:
ex. i mail to ezlibrarian+research@gmail.com (filter have created and enable);gmail will deem it as
ezlibrarian+res so the filter is invalid.
btw. if i mail ezlibrarian+fun@gmail.com ,i could not find this mail be labled as fun, the mail was put into the all mail folder.:(