Almost everyone has a Gmail account, and as Google adds more and more services that require you to use your Gmail ID, its popularity is not going to diminish anytime soon. Another advantage of Gmail is the extensive amount of space it offers for each inbox, which lets us send out and receive as many heavy attachments as we wish, without ever worrying about running out of space. But sometimes, too much space can be an overwhelming thing. Here are a few ways to effectively manage your Gmail inbox and not let your mails become hard to find: Use the message thread feature: It basically helps save all e-mails exchanged with your contacts with the same subject line within a single thread of conversation. This way, all you need to do is look up the subject line of the mail and access all the multiple replies exchanged, instead of it appearing as multiple messages in your inbox. Whenever you think the thread is getting too long, all you need to do is to edit the subject line and you can create a brand new message thread too. Labels: Now, this might get a little frustrating initially, but in the long run, you know it’s absolutely helpful. You can organize messages you receive from different contacts into different labels – customize the name of the label as well as the color, so that you can easily identify the messages from a particular sender by clicking on the label in the list under the inbox, rather than manually scanning through your entire inbox. Archiving old mails: Archiving is an efficient way to keep your Gmail inbox clean and clutter-free. You can choose to archive whole message threads that you don’t consider important enough or mails that you know you won’t need to go back to anytime soon. Archiving mails essentially removes all labels marked to the mails and sends it out of your inbox. You can still search for it and retrieve it, should you require it, but it just won’t be in front of you, taking up unnecessary rows in your inbox. Mark important mails: There are two ways of doing it – one is by clicking on the Star next to the mail’s subject line on the inbox screen, and the other is by clicking on the Important label next to the Star. Sometimes, Gmail figures out the ‘importance’ of the message for itself, depending on the sender, the subject line and the content. You can de-select the important label for messages that you don’t think need the label, and Gmail will automatically tweak the settings and keep it in mind for the future too.
