Smart Tags in Gmail
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 2/5/2015 10:42:40 PM
Gmail tags are awesome. They just need better tools to automatically tag emails as they come in.
When Google released Gmail, it didn't have folders; it had tags. For some people this was considered crazy, because they were so accustomed to the idea of putting things into folders that they couldn't even consider an email system without them.
Eventually people learned that unlike placing an email into one folder, they could tag any given email with as many tag names as they want, making it easy to find an email that fit more than one category.
For example, if you received an email with a proposal from a client who is waiting for a reply, you might tag that email as:
Clients... because it's a client.
Proposals... because it's a proposal.
Pending... because you are still waiting for a reply.
Vandalay Industries... the client's name.
Then you can easily find that email in any of those tags. Once that proposal is no longer pending, you can remove the "Pending" tag, and all the rest can remain for future reference.
With such flexibility, there are ways to make it even better, by automatically tagging emails as they come in, as long as they meet certain criteria.
Technically, Gmail already has a feature to setup filters, but it's awkward and you need to go through quite a few steps to create a good set of filters.
Instead of creating a long list of seemingly unrelated filters, the easier solution is to create a "Smart Tag Editor", which would work somewhat like Apple's Smart Playlist in iTunes.
Let's say you created a Smart Tag called "Clients". You could simply edit the rules for your "Clients" Smart Tag, and simply add a list of all the email addresses that should be labelled "Clients".
Alternatively, you should be able to post multiple rules within a Smart Tag, that factor in things like the date/time, subject line, words, text, attachments, etc.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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