Organizing your mailaccount: part1

Dear geeks,

Have already been in the same situation as me? Having several e-mail addresses. Each for their own purpose and network of people? But you do not want to check all your email-accounts separately? Or you have 2000 unread items in your mailbox and you do not know where to start filtering and removing? Then this tutorial will help you to clean and filter your mail on an efficient way.

My weapon of choice: Gmail

Why? Not only Gmail offers free mail with 8gb limit, but above that the user interface is very intuitive and straight forward. with the new beta of the great mail service I am totally convinced to use this as my main mail setup. Since two weeks I am using the new beta of Gmail which give me the ability to filter mails, label them and preset email rules such I am used to do in Microsoft outlook.

Colors means structure, structure means easy email handling

To start organizing your email properly I suggest you first create some labels, which you fit your needs. First think about how you would lke to organize your content, write it down on a paper, and keep it next to you when proceeding to the next step. In my case the structure would contain a label for private,work,living, online buying, etc. but this is totally up to you. Think about the color you want set per section. For example: Use a color that reflects the company logo, or colors that seems logical to you. Write these down next to the structure you just created on your sheet.

Now we are going to create the labels inside Gmail. Login to Gmail.com with your credentials and navigate via the side navigation on the left of your screen. Select “Create new label” if available. If not, first select “More” and then “Create new label”.

Create all the labels you desire, and if necessary nest them one by one. Don’t worry, you can redo, undo All adjustments are possible after setting up this basic label structure.

Alright, so far so good! Now it’s time to finalize the structure by adding colors to it. Unfortunately Gmail does not allow us to do that in one step, so we need to do this in a separate process. Click on a label, you just created and select the color you desire. Another possibility is to create custom labels if you are out of options. Repeat this step for all the labels you created. Once done the first part of organizing your mail account is executed successfully.