Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Gmail perfection using superstars and multiple inboxes

So it hit me the other day that I needed more than just staring an email in GMail so that I could follow up because there was no difference when I starred an email that needed to be addressed sooner rather than later and I found two Google Labs projects that have made my life so much easier.

Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature:
(1) Go to the "General" Settings page to choose which superstars you wish to use.
(2) Use either the keyboard shortcut ('s') or click to rotate through your selected superstars.
(3) Use the search operator "has:" to find all messages with your superstar (e.g. "has:red-bang", "has:blue-star"). Learn the name of a superstar by hovering over its image in the "General" Settings page.

Add extra lists of emails in your inbox to see even more important email at once. The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want, configurable under Settings.

I have configured superstars with the yellow-star and the red-bang for now. In my Multiple inboxes configuration I have the following

has:red-bang
has:yellow-star AND label:Work-Related
has:yellow-star AND !label:Work-Related

So frigging cool.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I tried the multiple inboxes but the page I got looked like chaos. Perhaps I didn't do the next step of going to Settings and arranging?

Priorities and kinds of To Do's are easily handled via labels such as
a Promise/Obligation
AAA NOW NEXT
DO THIS SOON
TRACK, FOLLOW UP

and etc.

Important ones need to start with letter a so can see them without scrolling down, after clicking on Labels.

Thanks for your tips in this blog.

Hans said...

I find that an additional long label like that cuts into the preview of messages. The star area is already there, so superstars saves me a bit of horizontal space.

It would be nice to be able to "split" the main inbox from the other inbox "queries", this way you could expand either to full screen or move the splitter.