3 reasons why Gmail’s labels are better than Outlook’s folders

Email inboxes have so much content these days that not being able to organize them using folders or labels would lead to users going insane. Organizing your inbox helps you stay in controls of your information and communication, and is key to working efficiently.

Email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird and Mail.app have had folders for ages to help users file their emails. Most email clients on phones support folders elegantly too. Folders were a hit on Outlook and other clients because people already knew how to organize files on their computer into folders. And then Gmail came along and introduced a completely new concept for organizing your inbox – Labels.

Labels are less like folders, and more like Tags that are now so popular on forums and QnA sites. While deceptively simple, they trump Folders in their ability to help us organize our inboxes in many ways. 3 of the top reasons labels are so much better than folders:

1. It is possible to add multiple labels to an email: It makes for amazing ways to remember what an email is about. For instance, you can apply to labels to an email that say “Sales Lead” and “Lead Closed”. You can reach the email by going through either labels, and when you reach the email, you see both the labels attached. It quickly conveys a lot about the context of the email. Doing this is with folders is very messy.

2. Gmail’s features for searching through labels: You can search for keywords within one or a set of many labels. Just try a query like the following:

Whats even more awesome is that you can also search for email conversations that do not contain a certain label. Try something like this:

In this query, you are searching for email conversations that have the word “proposal” and have the label “Sales Lead” and “Q3 2102″ but not the label “Lead Closed”.

3. Being able to Share Labels makes collaboration super simple: Sharing Gmail Labels is not a native Gmail feature, but is implemented beautifully with GrexIt’s Shared Labels functionality. What this lets you do is, it helps you and your colleague’s share email conversations by just adding labels to them.

So, you can just add a label called “Assigned to John” on an email, and John and everyone in your team sees the email and the label in their inboxes with the label almost immediately. John can finish the task and mark the email with another label called “Status – Done”. It makes it incredibly easy for your team to collaborate, right from your email inboxes.

Here’s how easy it is it to set up a Shared Gmail Label with GrexIt. All you need to do is choose a label, say which users in your company you want to share the label with, and you’re good to go.

If you are not using Labels heavily already, we suggest you start to do that, and you’ll note an immediate improvement in your and your team’s efficiency. And then take GrexIt’s Shared Labels on a test drive, and we are sure you won’t look back.