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GMail etiquettes

Shubham wrote about some GMail tips a few days ago. I follow the most of the points mentioned by Shubham - in fact some of these habits were perfected by both of us together in our NITIE days. But there are some slight differences in my ways, and a few more quirks which I use; I annotate them below:

  1. I follow points 1 & 2 and 6& 7 ditto, except that in point 2 - I don't need a 'Misc' label. Almost everything I receive either will get labeled and archived or simply get trashed. The only equivalent to 'Misc' that I can think of is my label 'Forwards'.
  2. About Mailing lists / Groups - I don't have a generic label like 'faltu' but have very specific labels. For example, emails from all Open Source software / Linux related groups goes into GNULinux label. Similarly, all mails from social work networks go into 'SocioPolitic' label.
  3. I am guilty of not following point 5 - I don't usually label my Sent Mails. So my Sent Mails remain unlabeled unless someone replies to them, which is when I label them.
  4. I have one more recently invented trick. To enhance the 'searchablity' of the emails I usually add replies sent to my own self, to an email. The replies contain certain 'keywords' which I feel will help me locate / search the mail on a later date.
    This is especially helpful when the mail contains names or words which can have multiple spellings. One can reply with all possible spellings in the thread so that on searching any of those spellings, the particular mail turns up in the results.
  5. Another of my GMail habits it is to prefix my frequented labels with numbers. For example, one of my most frequently used labels is 'NITIE' however, since it starts with an 'N', it used to appear at the end of my labels list, so I renamed it as 04NITIE, thus shooting up its position.
    Similarly, one of my labels 'Blog' is very sparingly used (to archive any good comments on my blog) - but it used to appear quite high up in my label list. But firstly due to renaming other 'last comers' like NITIE and also due to its own renaming as '09Blog' - it now appears almost at the end of my label list.
  6. Another noteworthy point is that I have a label named 'Contact' which is attached to all emails containing phone numbers. Another of my labels is called 'Subscriptions' which archives all 'welcome' emails from web services where I have registered.
Hope you find these Gmail tips useful - here is one more tip from a tech blog. If any of you have any more GMail etiquettes to add to the list above, please share your ideas ... it would help me improve my own Mail productivity.
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Comments

  1. Wondering Wanderer2:51 PM

    Clarification:- I fo not use any label by the title "faltu" either. By this word, I was referring to all the insignificant mails we get in our mailboxes.

    Comment:- I have labels named "Contacts" and "Subscriptions" too, which I use for the same purposes as you.

    ReplyDelete

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