Gmail zero inbox

[PaulK]

I am similar. Email 'folders' at work and 'labels' at home (Gmail) are for reference. Anything that is 'follow up', 'waiting for' etc becomes a project or next action as appropriate.

I agree on 'cheap' for Gmail and don't worry too much about deleting, just archive. The search facility is brilliant and occasionally useful to find a previous email thread. At work, with limited storage space, I am more ruthless and delete email that is definitely not required. I also archive quarterly and maybe only need to dig into the archive files a couple of times a year.

[hacker]

I'm confused. I think Gmail is by far the BEST way to keep an empty inbox. I have 120,000 emails in my Gmail account, and zero in my inbox right now.

If you want to search within a specific label later, just use the "label:" term. For example, if I wanted to find a file with the word "invoice" in my "awesome" folder, I could search for:

label:awesome invoice

It's great! Just archive away, or use the time-saving "Send & Archive" labs feature to shave off a few more seconds.

Or am I missing something here?

Yes, you're missing the single-biggest requested feature from all Gmail users: The ability to search for unlabeled email. It's not possible, without all sorts of hacky mechanics that include excluding each and every label, individually.

Since "labels" in Gmail are really IMAP folders, I have several hundred. I run out of search query space when I try to -label:foo -label:"Bar and Blort", and so on.

The other problem I've noticed is that Gmail "folds" mail away, hidden, invisible in your Inbox, until you uncover it by deleting more (and I'm not talking about Page 2, Page 3, etc.).

The only way to really cleanse the mail folders is via searching for all unlabeled email, and Gmail lacks this feature, and it's been asked for thousands upon thousands of times, over the last 7 years.

[PaulK]

I don't understand the problem in searching for unlabeled mail?

As long as you know who sent it, or some text that would be in the email, it works fine for me.

[hacker]

I don't understand the problem in searching for unlabeled mail?

Yes, you don't seem to understand the problem.

As long as you know who sent it, or some text that would be in the email, it works fine for me.

So what if you don't know the content, don't know who sent it, don't know when, and just want to find any and all email that has never been categorized, labeled or even read?

[James Taylor]

So what if you don't know the content, don't know who sent it, don't know when, and just want to find any and all email that has never been categorized, labeled or even read?

I use gmail and use labels for project reference material; all other stuff just gets archived so I know I can find it if necessary using search at a later date.

I don't understand why you would want a search to return [I]all[I] unlabelled email? Unless you suddenly decided you wanted to either delete all of it, or go through it and label all of it?

[PaulK]

So what if you don't know the content, don't know who sent it, don't know when, and just want to find any and all email that has never been categorized, labeled or even read?

Now I understand. I 'process' email from the inbox, so it is always read at that point. Next actions, projects or waiting fors are created in list manager (Toodledo). The email is then archived for later searching and labelled if required. I never archive email that is unread.

Obviously this may not work for you, but I genuinely have Gmail inbox zero at least every couple of days.

[hacker]

Obviously this may not work for you, but I genuinely have Gmail inbox zero at least every couple of days.

I have 12 years of email, over 120,000+ emails in Gmail, organized into about 200 separate, layered IMAP folders.

Gmail's labels don't directly translate to the IMAP folder structure; they're more like "tags" (like the kind that would populate a tag cloud), and Gmail tends to "fold" mail away (hide it) until you specifically search for it.

I find all sorts of mail that has NEVER hit my Inbox, via searching for specific words. It always brings up unlabeled email that is not in any IMAP folder. It's sitting in the Inbox, hidden, in some invisible state.

Being able to search for all mail that is not in the Inbox, and not in any labels or IMAP folders, would help me take those emails and re-classify them into their appropriate categories, tags and labels.

[donnbrow]

I have to agree with some people here pointing out that GMAIL is right now by far one of the best email providers existing and I can definitely say that my inbox counts zero too since I am able to put everything in the right order where it belongs. And it makes me perfectly comfortable and happy.

I have tried Yahoo! several times before but this just was awful and above all it used to hack my account so often, that it automatically went through my contacts spamming. It was really horrible.