I love using GMail. It’s easy to use and is accessible from home and work. Plus it has more disk space than Hotmail and doesn’t use up room on my computer. I moved all of my mailing lists over to GMail.
One thing I noticed after moving all the mailing lists over was the absence of folders in GMail. I have become very attached to mail folders to organise my email in Outlook, and I was disappointed that this functionality was not available in GMail. That is until I found a workaround. Here’s the process I use.
- Create a new label (i.e. CSS-D) by clicking on “Edit labels” in the Labels panel or going to “Settings”
- In Settings, click on “Filters”
- Click on “Create a new filter”
- Type in mailing list prefix (i.e. [css-d]) in subject field and press “Next step”
- Make sure “Skip the Inbox” is checked and select the new label from the “Apply the label” dropdown
- Select “Create Filter”
Your Labels panel will now act as a folder list. This filter will prevent mailing list messages from showing up in the GMail Notifier. This would be a benefit to some and a detriment to others.
I’ve since become attached to labels and now prefer them to folders. One of the benefits is being able to store messages under multiple labels rather than being stuck with a single folder.
Either way, there you go. I hope you find this useful.
UPDATE (03 Jan 2006): This post was listed on digg.com. Digg it.