Gmail’s Labels: Now Even More Like Folders!
By Harry McCracken | Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 11:20 am
Gmail’s Labels, which started out as a contrarian alternative to the folders used by every other e-mail app on the planet, are getting more and more folder-like. Google is moving the list of Labels to sit right below your inbox (you know, where folders generally reside) and now lets you drag e-mails to a Label to organize messages (you know, the way you can with folders). You can also drag Labels onto messages, and can hide Labels.
Unlike many new Gmail features, these aren’t debuting as Gmail Labs experiments–Google is rolling them out to everybody right away. (They haven’t shown up in my Gmail accounts yet, though.)
With these changes in place, I’d say that Labels effectively are folders. Except that one e-mail can be organized with multiple Labels at a time.
Now, if Google would only let me undo Conversation threads and see my inbox in an old-fashioned unthreaded view–or at least put the newest message at the top of a conversation–it would be pretty much perfect.
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July 1st, 2009 at 7:28 pm
There must be an option to show labels with unread messages before the remaining labels.
July 6th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
What I want to see is the introduction of my radical new innovation … the “Sub-Label” (trademark, copyright, all rights reserved).
Google definitely possess the genius to engineer my radical new concept. Sub-label capability within the Gmail email solution would allow grouping of labels within labels, taking the incredible Google labeling technology to new extremes of innovation.
We are also in talks with Microsoft about a Professional Release, with a tiered price structure of solutions based on the number of sub-label levels available to the end user.