Multiple Inboxes!

Who doesn’t love Gmail’s labels and filters feature? I use it to filter every bit of mail that comes my way.

All my Facebook emails go to one label, Orkut goes to another, the emails from my old college mailing list to a label color-coded yellow, and all the Google Alerts with “Peter Jalbert” in them goes into a specially-marked label. (I’m paranoid about what people write about me, what can I say?)

But sometimes it’s a hassle if you go to each and every label and check the mail there. What if you want to see your new emails with one glance?

Octavian “Vivi” Costache, Software Engineer for Google, took it a step further and created for multiple inboxes! You know, an inbox that shows you all the contents under your various labels? Check out Costache’s awesome inbox:

He says:

So when I heard about Gmail Labs, I started implementing a Labs feature in my 20% time that would help me (and you!) spend less time monitoring important messages that may end up getting filtered away. Starting today, you can try Multiple Inboxes, a Labs experiment which makes it possible to have more than one ‘inbox’ in your default Gmail view.

He also keeps all his starred and draft messages in separate panels. The key to this inbox pane is to label the message without marking it as read. Once you’ve read the message, there’s no point of seeing it as a message to read. To do that, select the email, and then the label from the new “Move to” drop down. It’s not actually moving anything – this is Gmail, after all. What it does do is to keep the status as unread while labeling and moving the message out of the main inbox and into the Archive. Now when you read the email, it will automatically be removed from the Multiple Inboxes pane.

This is a really useful time-saving feature. Your inbox might look a bit cluttered, but I don’t know, one glance can tell you everything. This is a better organizer than I hoped it would be.

So to activate Multiple Inboxes, you need to log on to your Gmail account, then go to Settings, and then click on to the Labs tab, and switch on Multiple Inboxes. If you’re too lazy, just click here.

So, have you tried this as well? Tell me about it!