Nested Labels in Gmail (finally) | Hacker News Reader

Nested Labels in Gmail (finally)

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57 pointsshrikant27 comments

Now, where's my naïve bayes classifier to sort my mail automagically into those labels instead of writing a gazillion filter rules?

Fuck, I'd settle for just being able to reorder my filter rules!

And I wouldn't even insist on naïvity.

Nested labels would fail eventually. Labels/tags were invented to avoid the awkwardness of a tree structure, I don't see the point of re-inventing a tree structure on top of labels.

At a conceptual level, a tree-structure of tags is just meta-tagging. You apply the "Family" tag to the "Kids" tag and the "Home" tag to the "Family" tag, and you now get that much more information out of applying the "Kids" tag and can filter more efficiently. (E.g. filter all "Home" tags out of a view, rather than itemizing each and every tag that you imagine falls under the idea of "Home stuff") The tree is then just a visualization of relationships and not a strict hierarchy.

I don't know if Google has implemented them this way (I'd like to hope so). But if they have not, it's not a failing of the idea.

Exactly so. This is why Delicious's "tag bundles" exist. (Bundles are tags for tags, but tagtags or whatever sounded stupid and confusing.)

probably why it's just a Labs feature for now - i.e., for testing.

I tthought the gmail (heck, Google) way was to search, not sort? Of course, now you can do both -- but the danger is the more labels can be used like folders the less likely new users (coming from an Outlook world) will embrace the gmail way.

They'll come around. Outlook users already (try to) use search, because sorting alone never works. So they'll use Gmail search and over time come to see that it's so good, they'll just stop explicitly organizing.

I know I did. I was tagging everything when I started using Gmail. Now, I don't even bother.

This is one of those features you only add to make converts feel at-home.

Sweet. I've long held the belief that a good information manager should allow any folder to have multiple parent folders...thus allowing the user to store their information hierarchically, or labelly, or a mixture, depending on what is most natural for them.

As it happens, that's what I'm working on at the moment: a web-based information manager (notes, bookmarks, uploaded files etc), with nested labels + search as you type.

wow. in 2004 delicious had hierarchical tags. x would retrieve things tagged as x, x/blah, etc. had to take it out for performance reasons, though.

We implemented hierarchical tags for our oil and gas search engine, having been inspired by delicious: http://www.resourceplay.com

Hierarchical tagging has tremendous practical utility for sifting through large volumes of data.

interesting site.

the "see who else viewed this well" thing seems creepy though.

ok. I removed that feature.

This is actually the second version of the same idea -- "an oil and gas search engine".

The first version was called "Hydrocarbon Search": http://hydrocarbon.search.eser.org/

By including delicious-like hierarchical tags, the second version became much more useful.

Problem was, there was no business model.

So, I'm working on the third version now -- its designed to run on the yet-to-be-released GPS-enabled iPad.

So, you can take it out into the field and have it tell you about nearby oil wells, seismic surveys, leaseholds, remote sensing data, surface linears, offshore oil and gas blocks (if you are on a boat, for example), etc...

It's going to be pretty sweet. The business model is to charge for each region seperately: north texas, west texas, east texas, colorado, offshore shallow gulf of mexico, offshore deep-water gulf of mexico, north sea, australia, etc...

And since the data changes daily, it will be a subscription service.

Hopefully, third time is a charm

Shame it [gmails version] doesn't work like that though.

It seems not to work with existing labels whose names contain a slash, even if you rename those labels. Also note that the parent label must exist, e.g. to have "people/friend-a" and "people/friend-b" appear in a hierarchy, you must also have a "people" label.

'finally'? gimme an option to group filters, not labels.

That, plus some extra not-label filters, such as by-date and by-source. With lists automatically mined from what's in the box, of course (e.g. top-10 correspondents for the month).

For example: hmm, I'm looking for something from early 2006, and it involved either joe@foo, bob@bar or someone from example.com ...

For your exaple, what about putting the following in the "From:" search field:

example.com OR joe@foo.com OR bob@bar.com) AND (after:2007/8/1 before:2008/8/30

Yes, it's somewhat awkward syntax, but it gets the results you're looking for.

Thanks for the tip, I hadn't really looked into doing it in GMail. My 'back' was hurting from some archive digging in a classical desktop mail client this past weekend ;-) (though it's a pretty good one, KMail from KDE 3.x)

Some pretty GUI checkboxes would go down nicely - I like what some e-commerce sites have (I think newegg.com is a good example.)

Wonder why they didn't treat hierarchical labels by attaching labels to labels. That way you can have "Family/Kids" and "CuteStuff/Kids" refer to the same "Kids", you wouldn't need to always type out the hierarchy and can just say "Kids" to have an email accessible under both the hierarchies.

Why not just tag it with both "Family" and "Kids"... you know... like you can do with labels?

I think I see where you're going, but

attaching labels to labels

gives me pause - "brain asplodes", as they say, plus cyclic graphs, etc.

labels>folders. Users couldn't understand this because they are messed up from oultook etc. Now gmail is actually transforming labels to folders

Hierarchy does not imply folders. The difference between folders and labels is the multiplicity between message and label/folder. 1 message, many labels. 1 message, 1 folder.

I agree - all they've done is change how the labels are displayed. The 1:many relationship (which is the power of labels, and where Outlook fails) hasn't gone anywhere.

Some people don't get labels, and use them like Outlook folders. They were doing this before the labels were hierarchical, and they'll keep doing it. But for those of us who get (and love) labels, this just makes it easier to keep them under control.

My main use-case for this: I don't care about emails related to income tax for 51 out of 52 weeks. I label the messages appropriately, archive them, and search by label when I'm doing my taxes. I can now take that label - as well as the others like it - and hide them all under one "Infrequent" label and clean up my "More Labels" view.

Its not bad but I wish they remembered the position of opened or closed. It sucks I have to manually expand them each time I go into gmail.

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