Gmail is google’s web-based email service, so as you can expect, using Gmail is really easy and the features of Gmail are so interactive that you can learn to use it in just a few minutes. You can send and receive messages easily, you can use it to organize your emails and contacts, but mostly, you can organize your emails according by their labels and filters. Besides the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail allow you to use your mailbox smoothly and fast. Finally, you can also sort through and search the messages in your inbox by using the search box in your Gmail page, which is really intuitive.

Here is a short description of my two favorite Gmail features for emails organization:

• Gmail labels are an excellent feature in managing your emails. When you receive an email in your inbox, you can categorize it into as many labels as you want, which are a bit like folders but then with the advantage that you can add more than one label to each message. So create different labels in your inbox to organize your emails. To create a label, click settings>labels, select create new, type the name of your label and then select ok. Once a label has been created, you can view all the messages within that label by clicking on the label name on the left side of your inbox, or by searching the contents of that label by typing in the search box. Once created, labels can be easily edited or deleted or even hidden. You can directly apply labels to a message with the “l” letter on your keyboard, by selecting the checkbox next to the message and then selecting the label name from dropdown menu, or by dragging the particular message to a label name to include it within that label. You can also use different background and font colors for each label to make your message organization more visual.
• Gmail filters allow you to manage the flow of incoming emails in your inbox automatically and very effectively. Using filters, you can automatically archive, delete, label, star or forward your emails. To create a filter, click on the “create a filter” button on top of the Gmail page. Then, enter your filter criteria in the appropriate fields, following the simple instructions. You have to select one or more actions from the list. These actions will be applied to the incoming messages in your inbox in the order that you have specified. For example, you can label all the messages for your work email address with the “work” label and star them to remember to check them. This is useful for new incoming messages, but you can also use it by applying the filter to existing messages in your inbox. Filters can be edited or deleted easily and you can combine more than one for filter for maximal efficiency.

Gmail also recently launched the priority inbox feature which is also nice to sort emails into categories like important, unread, starred, etc.

Now if you want to simplify your life and workflow, a good idea is to get all your messages from your multiple emails into your Gmail inbox. So how do you do that? Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Set up your other emails to forward automatically all your messages to your Gmail address. For most web-based emails, you can simply go to your settings and for hosted emails, you can do it with your cPanel or asking your host’s customer service.
2. Set up Gmail to be able to send your messages using alternative email addresses. For that, go to your Gmail settings and under “Send mail as”, click “Add another email address”. Enter your name and other email address here.
3. Click “Verify”. Gmail will then send a verification link and code to your other email address.
4. Since you’ve already set up your other email to forward all your emails to Gmail, simply open up your Gmail inbox to see the new message. Just follow the simple instructions: click on the verification link and your new “send from” address will be activated.

Sending an email from your other email address is really easy. When you compose a new mail, you can choose in the dropdown box of the sender addresses and choose the one you want to use. Similarly, when you reply to a message, you can just reply to the address selected by default, or you can change it in the sender dropdown menu. You can of course forward as many addresses as you want to your Gmail account, so now you don’t have to log into more than one account anymore ever, you can simply read and respond to all your messages from your Gmail account!!