Labels in Gmail are like folders in Outlook and other email programs but give you an extra bonus: One email message (or conversation) can have more than one label. Once you’ve created a label, you can view all the messages with that label by searching, or by clicking the label name along the left side of any Gmail page.
This page explains how to create and assign labels to messages.
To create a label:
- Open the email you want to assign a label to.
- Click the Labels drop-down menu or if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled, type l (lower-case L). Or, just click Settings > Labels:
- Select Create new at the bottom of the label list:
- Type the name of your new label in the box and click Ok
- Your labels will appear on the left hand side of the window.
Tips
Bunching: If you plan on having a lot of labels, consider an introductory code of two letters and a colon to ensure related labels are close to each other. For example:
Colors: As you can see above labels stand out by colour. By default labels have only faint colors. To change a label’s color, click on the little square to the left of the label’s name. The color may be too faint to see easily, in which case just try moving your mouse over the space to the left of the label’s name. A black downward arrow will appear:
Click on the downward arrow and a color palette will appear:
Choose a color, or add a custom one.
You can also use this menu to rename your label, to delete it, and to tell Gmail whether you want this label to appear in your list even if there are no unread messages with that label (useful when you start to build up a lot of labels.)
Assigning labels to emails
Gmail bunches emails in the same chain—i.e., those with the same subject line–into one thread, which Google calls a conversation. So assigning a label to one email in the conversation will add that label to all emails in the converstaion.
You can add a label to a conversation in several ways:
Open the conversation and then clicking on the drop down Label menu and selecting the boxes next to the desired label(s) (or unselecting those checked boxes of labels you want to remove):
OR
Open the conversation and then drag the desired label from the left hand column with your mouse, and then releasing it (releasing the mouse button) somewhere over the email conversation. If you’re doing it right you should see the label floating over the email conversation:
In all cases you’ll see a message appear above the email window thus:
OR
You can move the message to the label, by clicking on the two columns of dots to the left of the message, and then dragging it to the label in the left hand column before releasing the mouse button when the desired label is highlighted. You’ll see a message float next to it “Move 1 conversation”. This technique will also remove the message from your inbox and place it in the archive.
If you want to assign a label to multiple messages/conversations at once, select the messages by checking the boxes to their left:
