Gmail

I have been using Gmail since early 2005--back when someone had to send you an invitation. I have accumulated several different email addresses over time and Gmail is by far my favorite. I've found it to be more intuitive and flexible than any of the other platforms I use and for that reason it's my primary email.

John, Emily and Melissa have all described many of the reasons why I love Gmail so much. So instead of rehashing all of the great features they mention, I'm going to talk about three other features that I've started to use a lot recently: labeling, filtering and the new * EOM * feature.

Labeling: Gmail will let you create label your email messages which is another helpful way to group emails on the same topic or from the same person (or whatever) together. All you have to do is, under the "More Actions" drop-down menu, look for "Apply Label" and then click on "New Label" and name your label. And then you can color-code your labels! I use 15 different labels (I seem to be adding new ones all of the time though). While it's simple enough to label emails myself, I recently discovered that Gmail will label emails for me if I set up a filter...

Filtering: Filtering is really simple to set up. If you click on "Settings" in the upper right hand corner of your screen, and then select the "Filters" tab, selecting "Create a New Filter" at the bottom. There are so many different ways you can set up filters. I have only been using them to label emails (especially ones from listservs) but you can have them automatically delete or archive or star emails as well. You can also retroactively filter your inbox (so if you label certain kinds of messages with a filter, you can have it label all of the emails in your inbox that match that criteria already). There is a lot of information in the "Help" section on setting up filters, including a demo video if you are interested.

EOM: I send myself a lot of email, which is probably a weird thing to do. As it turns out, though, putting something in the subject line of an email and having it show up in the top of my inbox has turned out to be a really good way of helping me remember whatever it is.

Google is very nice and helpful in that if you try to send an email without a subject line or without anything in the body of the email, it will pop-up and make sure that you didn't just forget. Granted, it takes virtually no time to click "OK" on the pop up message but if I'm sending myself a rapid succession of reminders on different topics, it can get a little annoying.

Luckily, they announced Wednesday on the "Official Google Blog" that there's a new feature that will let you bypass the pop-up reminder if you're sending an email with only a subject line. All you have to do is to add "EOM" or "(EOM)" --without the quotation marks--to the end of your subject line. I like that I don't have to turn off the notification for good, or worry about turning it on and off. In the scheme of things this is a very, very small feature...but I really appreciate how flexible they're trying to make Gmail AND how they are always adding or improving something.