Peter's Blog

Been playing with Gmail some more, looking at it's features.

Labels

Instead of putting email in folders you assign it labels. You can then click on the label name to get a list of all emails that have that label. This is functionally the same as having folders. One advantage is that more than one label can be assigned to an email so it can be categorised in different ways. I don't see any way to AND labels together, i.e list emails with label1 AND label2. I tried using the search box but that did not work. I would say this would be a useful geeky feature. The labels then approach the power of the taxonomy system in Drupal (although in a single vocabulary with no hierarchy: hey I sound like a computer scientist!!).

Filters

Easily used to apply labels to new email.

Archive

I had ignored this before but I think the intention is that instead of leaving everything in the 'Inbox', once you have read your mail you press the Archive button to put it in an archive. This leaves the Inbox uncluttered. You can get at your archive by searching, clicking on labels, etc.

Spam

Automatically filtered, and generally very well. Spam messages to not appear in the 'All Mail' list or search results. There is no way of knowing new spam is there except by looking in the folder (folders, not labels, mixed paradigms).

Conclusion: I love Gmail, it follows googles fast, simple and powerful approach.