Organize your Gmail and have fun while doing it | Hacker News Reader

Organize your Gmail and have fun while doing it

0boxer.com

21 pointsfogus12 comments

Not sure I want some crazy app reading all my email.

In any event, I long ago created labels (Friends, Family, one for each mailing list, etc.) and automatically filter + archive every incoming email I know about.

So my Inbox contains only unsorted emails, which will get filters if there's more than a few from any source, and everything else gets filed under an appropriate category. I can tell at a glance whether anyone in my family has emailed me and it won't get lumped together with, say, Bugtraq. It also makes things easy to search (e.g. "label:Bugtraq ssh vulnerability").

And don't go thinking that because you have an inbox full of 20,000 unsorted emails that you can't do this. Just start making labels, then filter things into them and apply those filters to your current email (be sure to 'archive' them). Then your inbox will gradually go down to zero. If there's any limit to the number of filters you can have, I haven't hit it yet.

There is a caveat to this. I find it makes checking mail on the move a PITA, namely - having to check more than the inbox for potentially important mail.

I got around this by using the filters in the same way you describe, but have gmail keep them in the inbox. That way, once I've read them I can delete them from my phone (which is really just archive) and they remain in the appropriate label/folder when I want to find them again.

Well, they don't get marked as read, so it's not really a problem for me, because I mark everything as read when I'm done with it. And "done" doesn't necessarily mean I read it, especially in the case of high volume mailing lists.

So all I have to do is expand the labels once to make sure there's nothing hiding in the labels I don't check very often. I really haven't had many problems with that and I prefer to keep all the email archived.

But I guess I don't (can't) check it on my phone, so maybe that makes more of a difference than I realize.

Exactly the same thing that I do. I currently have about 40 labels, ~60k emails and 3.2G of storage used and only 4 emails in my inbox. My inbox is always easy to clean and maintain. Also having years worth of archives of bugtraq/full-disclosure etc is great when trying to search for information. Just like today when searching for info about the recent kernel vuln, CVE-2010-3081.

This comment is out of topic but related.

When I saw this I thought about a video where the speaker talks about how our future could move/is moving towards a reality where human action is rewarded with points as in a game. I think that he made a prediction where this sort of thing could take off once game designers move away from games and into other activities.

Video: Most Disturbing Presentation Ever: Our Tech Nightmare ("Skinner Box") DICE 2010 Lenght: ~10min http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nka-_Mhp7f0&feature=playe...

> Organize your Gmail and have fun while doing it

I'm not sure if collecting virtual points fits my definition of "fun"...

On the other hand we all have fun while doing that on Hacker News :)

The scrolling feedback button on your About page is very annoying.

Here is a screenshot to show you what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/zUHud.jpg

Whoa. What version of Firefox are you running? The page doesn't look anything like that and the Feedback button is not at all in the way.

I get the same thing on Chrome (Mac, 5.0.375.125) if the window is too narrow.

3.6.10

Has anyone found any sort of a technical explanation of how this works or a privacy policy? I'm interested, but without some assurance my e-mail will remain private, there's no way I'm doing this.

Looks cool, but I get an error saying: "Something went wrong. Please try again." I tried again, and alas same problem.

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