Those of you who had bad experiences with gmail -- did you use labels and such early on, or did messages tend to go unlabeled/unfiltered?
I'm a huge gmail fan, but I labeled/archived things religiously from day 1 and haven't have to deal with a massive inbox.... It certainly seems as though the process of organizing a mountain of emails isn't as well-supported as organizing messages one-by-one as they arrive and are read. One feature I use fairly frequently, but which I haven't seen discussion on previously, is omitting certain labels from a search. I mark all messages from IxDA/SigIA/CHI-*/other lists under a single label, then apply additional labels to identify things like job, conference, and event listings. To search all lists for a topic, without getting a zillion job/conference/event listings mixed into the results, add one or more negated label terms (eg, " -label:events.listings"). Stringing together a bunch of negated label terms is also, to my knowledge, the only way to search for unlabeled messages. This adds an additional potential benefit not offered by folder-based systems: 'carving up' a result set using the organization (ie, not just keywords) to remove items which are sometimes signal, sometimes noise. For my use, this makes the labeling systems by gmail and delicious many times more effective than labels by themselves. ~Steven Pautz ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
