Six Easy Ways to Conquer Gmail

 Fetch Mail From Other Accounts

Though you probably have one primary e-mail account, you may regularly receive messages at more than one address. You can configure Outlook, Thunderbird, and other e-mail programs to download messages from all of your accounts, so that you can see all of your e-mail in one convenient location. Not surprisingly, Gmail lets you do the same thing, allowing you to centralize all of your mail in Gmail's inbox. Besides reducing your likelihood of forgetting which account has the message you're looking for, this practice ensures that all of your mail will pass through Gmail's excellent spam filter. For instructions on how to proceed, see "Use Gmail as a Universal Inbox."

 Label Automatically via Filters

One of the biggest obstacles to emptying your inbox quickly is the need to scan and prioritize incoming messages. Having all of your e-mail in one inbox is great, but it does complicate the task of sorting the messages that require immediate attention from those that can wait. One solution is to have Gmail automatically do the prioritizing for you by applying filters to incoming mail. The easiest way to create a filter is to open an example of the message that you want Gmail to act on, and then choose More Actions, Filter messages like these. Gmail will display the filter criteria that it has chosen in the sample message (often the From: address), along with a list of messages in your account that the filter would detect. Add or remove criteria by altering the contents of the various fields provided, and click Test Search to see how your changes affect the search results.

When you are satisfied with your filter's search criteria, click Next Step to determine what actions Gmail should take on the matching messages. Two obvious actions are Skip the Inbox (Archive it) and Apply the label. Check both of these, and select a label from the drop-down list. If you'd like to apply the filter to the messages in your test search results too, check the Also apply filter to... option and then click Create Filter to shunt incoming messages that match your filter criteria directly to a folder (see the image at left). You can create filters that forward messages to other e-mail addresses, apply Gmail's star flag, mark messages as read, or delete them--in effect hyper-prioritizing, delegating, or utterly ignoring specific projects or people before they arrive in your inbox. You have the power. Use it wisely. To view, edit, or delete your filters, choose Settings, Filters.