Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m pretty darn good.
Thanks for asking.
Today, we’re going to talk about email labels in Gmail.
We’re going to take a look at Gmail.
This demo today comes as a result of several emails that came back to back to me from the
community, from you folks in the community.
The first was from my friend, Umberto from Mexico.
Apparently I’ve been doing a few demos lately showing my email window which you just saw
and he says my videos are awesome.
I like Umberto.
But he also says, “How do you put a label on each email?”
Each email, you put a little green name of the email account.
So they noticed the labeling system that I have on my Gmail account.
Not only did he send that but also my good buddy, Korky Kathlann.
I really only wanted to Korky in because I love the name Korky.
Does anybody out there have a friend named Korky?
I wish I had a real friend named Korky.
Korky is my virtual friend.
I’d just like to say, I wonder where Korky is tonight.
I think that would be awesome.
Anyways, Korky is asking the exact same thing.
He’s asking, “I noticed that you have these tags in your Gmail.
How have you set up your Gmail?”
So today on DottoTech, we are going to answer Korky’s and Umberto’s question: how do
I do my little tagging in Gmail?
All right, let me show you how I have set up my Gmail system.
Now I want to have one caveat right off the top.
This is the way that I’ve set up my Gmail and it has kind of evolved over the years.
I didn’t come in with a strategy and then have it all pre-planned, how this is going
to work.
It has grown out of need, necessity and change that has come along.
So if you’ve got a better way of setting email or tagging or structuring your email,
by all means let me know.
Let us know in the Comments area but this is the way that I’ve done it.
There’s no guarantee that this is the best way.
It’s just how Steve does it.
The first thing that you need to understand is I wanted to set up the simplest email system
possible, which means I wanted to have my email as a web-based email client.
I didn’t want to be using Outlook or any other email client.
I wanted it to live in a browser.
Chrome is the browser, Gmail is the application that I chose and that’s the way that I wanted
to set things up because I wanted to very easily be able to transfer to my smartphones,
to my tablets, to other environments.
That’s kind of the overriding thing that I needed.
But once I decided that I was going to use Gmail, then I needed a way to be able to sort
my email within Gmail.
I don’t have just a single email address.
I have multiple email addresses that I use to run my business so I needed a way to demark
the email to be able to define and be able to scan through and very quickly sort which
emails come in to the business account, to my personal account, which emails are related
to different projects that I might be involved in.
That’s where these little labels come from.
They’re all designed to create instant visual structure to the email as it comes in.
I’ve gone through a small process in order to get to the point where I’ve got this
kind of labeling.
Now to kind of give you an idea of what the key is for my email, what each of these things
mean, any of these little blue ones indicate that these are coming to my DottoTech, to
my main email address.
The second label in that we see here, these colored ones and this one here, the yellow—that’s
my second favorite color of label actually—that tells me that there are payments coming in
to my Paypal account.
Woohoo, money!
I do a little happy money dance.
The green ones tell me that this email is coming from my community, from Patreon.
Now Patreon pays for a lot of what DottoTech does and the people who support us on Patreon
are very, very important to Steve so I want to notice and respond as quickly as I can
to every message coming from Patreon.
So I look for those green labels and as soon as I see them, I read them and I respond to
them so that I make sure that keep everybody on track.
That’s my structure here.
Now how did I get to this structure?
Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to set up Gmail to support multiple email
addresses because Gmail by itself in its native mode will support your Gmail account and one
address.
So we do most of the work on Gmail right here.
We go to the gear setting and we choose the Settings menu.
The Settings menu is where we do all of the different parameters relating to Gmail.
Now setting it up for multiple inboxes means that you have to go into Gmail Labs for the
most part.
There’s another way to do this which I’ll mention in a few moments but for the most
part, this is the way that I started doing it.
I went into Gmail Labs and I set up Enable Multiple Inboxes.
That just means that I can now ask Gmail to not just look for my normal Gmail account
but to look for other accounts, bring them in and include them in the client.
Once you’ve set up and turned on Enable Multiple Inboxes then you can go to your Accounts
and Imports settings.
I again apologize to your right away because just to make things easy for me and safer
for me, I’m going to blur the screen when we go to these because I’ve got all of my
email addresses listed out here and I don’t really want them on the big, wide interweb.
If you could see the screen clearly, what you’d see is the ability to send and receive
email and to set up multiple accounts within Gmail.
I indeed have multiple accounts here set up.
Now the other way that you can do this is just go to those other accounts and forward
that email into Gmail.
That’s a pretty easy way of doing it.
But regardless of which of the ways you do it, whether setting up multiple inboxes through
this Gmail interface or forwarding email into Gmail, the next thing you need to do is you
need to figure out a way to define what email account that email is coming from when you
visually look at it in your inbox because you want to be able to see what’s coming
from where in order to prioritize your day and prioritize your tasks.
So that’s the next step that we have to do.
Obviously, we’re going to do that through labeling.
How we go about creating these labels and then applying these labels is again a several-step
process.
The first thing we need to do is understand what these labels represent.
Now the labels are also represented here on the left-hand column.
Once again, let’s head back into our Settings, let’s go to Labels and take a look at what
we can see as far as labels go.
Click on the Labels tool and here are all of my labels.
You can see I’ve got lots of labels.
Actually, I have a lot more labels here than you can see here because these are just the
ones that are kind of current and active.
Now the way to think about a label is to think of labels as folders.
I’m not sure label is the best word for this.
They are basically collections of email that are related to each other because of some
mechanism.
It could be all of your invoices are one label.
It could be all of your email to one email account are labeled altogether.
We’ve got those types of opportunities as far as labeling.
Now within this window here, you can actually turn on and off different labels.
For example, I created a label this summer.
I was attending a friend’s wedding and I was doing a slideshow for their wedding.
I had sent out an email to all of the guests that were attending saying please send me
your pictures so that I can put together Mark and Sheila’s slideshow for their wedding.
I created a label which is like a folder.
Let me turn it on and show that and now it appears here.
Do you see how it appears here in the sidebar?
This allowed me to quickly sort things into it if I didn’t want to filter things, if
I just wanted to drag things and drop them in.
It allowed me to quickly organize all of the email related to Mark and Sheila’s wedding.
But now that the wedding has passed, I can choose to either remove this label or I can
just hide it—there’s no harm in just hiding it—so it doesn’t appear here but it’s
still here on the roster of available labels if I want it enacted again sometime in the
future, if I want to go back and find those emails for example.
But it isn’t kind of front of mind so it’s not appearing here in the side bar.
That’s number one, creating these folders or labels to create some structure.
Number two in this process is coloring these labels.
I’m always surprised.
Gmail doesn’t make this as evident as they probably should, I would think.
I would think that they should make it available right here.
Right here on this main menu is where you should be able to apply colors to the labels
but no, you can’t.
Instead you look and you move your mouse to the side of the label here in this field here
and you see I have a little pop-out.
If I click on that, it allows me to color it.
Now I can add custom colors or one of these preset colors to any of the labels.
That’s where we start creating the structure that will allow us to quickly visually identify
things.
It’s by coloring these labels because if we just leave the text in, we have to read
it as opposed to it being identified by that splash of color.
So you can see the ones that I’ve applied color to here.
When we go back to my inbox, you can see that I’ve got color on the ones that we were
talking about.
The last step is filtering email as it comes in.
We’ve set up multiple inboxes or multiple addresses coming to our Gmail account.
We set up labels so that we can identify and we can create a commonality between different
emails so they’re like folders.
Now we need to find a way to automatically apply these labels so that we can see the
color and we can see in our inbox what the relevant information is on those labels.
With filters, there are multiple ways to get to them.
If we go here to the Settings once again—you know that already, don’t you?—and we go
into Filters, these are all the filters that I have in place.
You can start from scratch creating a brand new filter just by clicking here on Create
a New Filter or you can use an existing email as kind of a template to create a filter.
Regardless of which way you go if we create a new filter here—I’ll click on that—you
can choose these different criteria for creating a filter.
You can choose who it’s from, who it’s to.
So if you’ve got email forwarded in from another email account, you would put the To
address being that email account and then you’d be able to label them all similarly.
That’s how I do it with the DottoTech label.
I’ve put in my business email address so all the email coming to that has that label.
You can base it on the Subject or Has the words.
The subject is how I do all of those emails that are related to my income.
Money coming in from Paypal, they all have the same subject because it’s auto-generated
so I brand that as coming from Paypal.
You could have all of these different criteria for the search.
Once you’ve set that all in place—let me just close it down; let me just open an
existing one and let’s choose the one here, say the notification of payment from Paypal.
Where is it here?
We’ll go from Patreon, applied label Patreon.
Let me edit that label and show you the details.
Once I’ve got where it’s coming from, the fact that I know it’s from Patreon,
if I click on the Continue button that then allows me to apply the label.
See here?
This is where I apply the label and it gives me access to all of the different labels that
I’ve built.
They will populate into that.
So choose it.
You can also choose to forward it, delete it or send an automatic reply.
You’ve got lots of different options here as far as the filtering goes but we’re really
talking just about labeling right now so Apply that label.
Since I’ve applied the green color to that label, once I update this filter where you
can see all the different people here, all the different emails that are from that particular
email address, they all end up with that green Patreon label so I’m able to instantly identify
it as it comes in and I can then deal with it appropriately.
I hope that’s clear to you.
Let me walk through the process one more time just to make sure that it’s entrenched.
The first step in using Gmail and creating these labels is enabling multiple inboxes
or forwarding your email from the different sources that you want into Gmail.
Once you’ve got that set up, then you’re going to want to create labels that you’re
going to want to filter your email on.
Then you’re going to want to color that label and then create a filter on those labels,
filter on the email coming in to direct it to whichever of the labels you want, which
are basically the same as folders at that point there.
Then you will have an inbox that looks like mine, full of colorful feedback, helping you
organize your day and be more productive.
I hope you found this video today’s to be useful.
There are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is of course subscribe to this channel, the second subscribe to our newsletter and
then you will hear about all of our upcoming webinars and other special events and also
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Finally as you see by the number of patrons that we have on Patreon, DottoTech is a community-funded
channel.
Our supporters at Patreon help us produce this content by giving us some financial support.
If you’re interested in what that’s all about—and there are perks and the perks
are awesome if I do say so myself—I invite you to drop in and visit our Patreon page.
With that, I am done for today.
Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.