It seems that Gmail has brought out the creative streak in a good few beta users, with a rash of handy tips being posted in the forums and on websites. I have got with the program way too late to be amongst those posting but many revolve around clever use of Gmail’s label and filter features to ‘enhance’ functionality. A couple that I have found useful so far are below along with links to some others.
How to save a draft email for later use
1. Create a label called Draft.
2. Create a filter that labels an incoming email as ‘Draft’ when it reads both the From and To addresses as having my gmail address. By checking the ‘Skip The Inbox’ (Archive mail) option, your drafts will not show up in you Inbox but simply await use in the archive.
3. Now you can write your drafts and, when you wish to save them for later use, simply send the message to your own gmail address. When it arrives, it will be labelled as “Draft”.
4. To access a draft previously saved in this way, simply click on the ‘Draft’ label in the lefthand pane of the main view (or elsewhere) to see all your draft mails.
c/o enbguy – Gmails forum
How to keep notes/records in Gmail
1. Create a contact called ‘Notes’ with the email address of username+notes@gmail.com
2. Create a label called Notes.
3. Create a filter that adds the ‘Notes’ label to any incoming email addressed to username+notes@gmail.com. Again, by checking the ‘Skip The Inbox’ (Archive mail) option, your ‘Notes’ mails will not show up in you Inbox but simply await use in the archive.
4. To file a note from another email account (or have a friend do so), simply send the information in a mail to username+notes@gmail.com with a suitable subject title to help recall.
5. To file a note from your own gmail account, simply compose the note with a suitable subject title to help recall and select the Notes contact with the username+notes@gmail.com created in step 1 before sending to yourself.
6. To access a note mail previously saved in this way, simply click on the ‘Notes’ label in the lefthand pane of the main view (or elsewhere) to see all your Notes.
More on filtering with the plus (+) command can be found on the Gmail Gems blog linked below.
c/o Jim – Jim’s Tips
More of the same can be found at BLADAM and the very sorted Gmail Gems which has an Atom RSS feed as well.