You may be surprised that Gmail doesn’t allow you to create folders to store your emails in.
Instead, Gmail uses a Labels system.
A conversation can have as many labels applied to it as you like, which can be better for organizing than using the folders system since, with folders, each conversation could only exist in one folder.
By default, Gmail has several different labels that can be applied to conversations, such as Inbox, Sent Mail and Important. Some of these are System Labels, while others are Custom Labels.
Each custom label has a drop-down menu to its name, providing you with a quick way to edit its properties.
Here, you can add or remove a colour to a label, allowing you to identify conversations visually. You can also rename, hide or delete a custom label.
Select a colour to tell Gmail to assign it to this label.
To hide a label, click the drop-down arrow next to it, and select Hide.
Notice that the Personal label no longer appears in our left menu, as it is now hidden.
To find the hidden label in the menu, click the More labels drop-down link.
Now you can see all other labels that have been marked as hidden.
Let’s unhide the Personal label.
From here, you can Manage labels or Create new labels using the links at the bottom.
You can also manage labels from the Settings menu.
Click the Wheel icon drop-down menu, and then click Settings.
Click the Labels tab.
System labels are at the top… and they cannot be removed. All system labels except for the Inbox can be shown or hidden.
Let’s show the Spam label. Click its show link.
Notice that Spam is now visible in the main menu.
At the bottom is where the custom labels are listed. You can show them, hide them, or remove them from here.
Let’s remove the Travel label by clicking the remove link.
Note that removing a label will not delete the messages with that label. The message that has no labels will still show up under All emails.
To rename a custom label, hover over its title and click on the text field that appears.
Click outside the edit box to finish editing the label, or just press Enter.
The labels will automatically re-sort in alphabetic order.
Click Create a new label to create the Travel label again.
We’ll also show the Receipts label… click its show link.
To finish, let’s scroll up and examine our changes.
As you can see, all of the changes we made on this page took effect immediately.
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to manage labels in Gmail.