I like Gmail but is has a few ridiculous things. First, you can’t sort the INBOX by SENDER. This is horrible. But…
Here is what i want to do: I run a search of my INBOX for all emails from Sender X. Gmail, does this fine.
Next I want to put all those emails in a FOLDER. You can check them all, but it doesn’t allow you to move them to a FOLDER. It gives you several options but not the option to move several searched emails to a FOLDER.
It is the “archive” step that I didn’t get. I was labeling stuff, but it was staying in the inbox. So after you label, you archive, and that tucks it away. Got It. I knew there had to be a process.
Thanks.
Additionally, you can set up a filter so that all email from a particular address (or almost any parameters you specify) will automatically be labeled and (optionally) archived. New emails from that sender will automatically go into that “folder” (and there will be a “new message” counter next to that label in the sidebar just like the Inbox).
Yeah, I want to avoid filtering. I think about using the FILTER function occasionally, but I like first seeing the email and then dealing with it. Every so often I get behind, and want to round up the emails and file them in their proper FOLDERS or LABELS. Yahoo made it easy…of course Yahoo is a disease ridden cesspool.
I totally get the underpinnings of whats going on and it’s a good system. Like I said, I didn’t know the archiving step. Its a good system really. Now if you could just sort by sender…
IMHO Google made things confusing by trying to make labels behave like folders.
But it’s still just a system based on labels. The “Move to” button applies the specified label and remove all other labels, while “Label as” adds a new label without removing others. “Archive” means remove the “inbox” label, as already explained above.
As for sorting by sender - Gmail is designed to group messages into “conversations”, and each “conversation” can have multiple senders (in addition to you), so I’m not sure how that can be added. You can turn off the “conversation view” but Gmail isn’t really optimized for that mode.
From your subsequent posts, it looks like you’ve got this mostly figured out. But just to clarify (and maybe add another point or two):
– An e-mail (actually, a whole conversation) can be labeled or not, independently of whether they are also in your in-box or sent-box or not. So after you apply a label to something in your in-box or sent-box, it is still in the in-box or sent-box as well.
– As already noted, an item can have multiple labels. Thus, in effect, it can be in multiple “folders” at once.
– What they call “archiving” an item simply means, remove it from the in-box (or sent-box). You can do this even if an item doesn’t have any labels at all. Thus, archiving an item is a distinctly different act than labeling an item. ETA: And archiving is distinctly different than deleting an item.
– Note the pre-defined “folder” called “All Mail”. ALL items sent or received, labeled or not, will always be there. So you can archive an item, even without a label, and later still find it there.
– Take a closer look at filters. They can do more than you think. You can test each incoming item against a variety of criteria (most obviously, by testing who it’s from) and apply a label automatically accordingly. You can also choose to have the item appear in you in-box or not, as you wish, even if you apply a label at the same time. There are other options as well, like having matching items be automatically forwarded to some address, or starred, or deleted.