Gmail has added a couple of noteworthy features to Gmail Labs. Nested Labels allows you to create a hierarchy or tree of labels, much like you would do with the folders in other email clients. The second is the Message Sneak Peek feature, which lets you see a small preview of each message without actually opening it.
Nested Labels
First thing you need to do is activated the Nested Labels feature in Gmail Labs. Find the green labs icon next to your email address on the top right of your Gmail window. Enable Nested Labels and remember to click Save at the bottom.
The next step is to actually create your nested labels. You do so by including a forward slash “/” in the name. So, you could create a hierarchy with “Black Web Media” as the root and have it contain labels like “Black Web 2.0,” “Young Black Professionals Guide,” and “Politic365.” Just create labes with the following names:
- Black Web Media
- Black Web Media/Black Web 2.0
- Black Web Media/Young Black Professionals Guide
- Black Web Media/Politic365
A couple of things to note here:
- If the root label already exists, you don’t have to create it from scratch
- If the sub-folders or sub-labels already exist, you will still be creating an entirely new label. For example, you already have a bunch of emails labelled as “Black Web 2.0,” but they won’t show up under “Black Web Media/Black Web 2.0.” This means that you will have to do a lot of relabeling if you want to move your current labels into the new format.
Message Sneak Peek
Most other mail clients offer you a preview of your messages in a separate pane. Message Sneak Peek brings a similar feature to your Gmail inbox. Once you enabled it in Labs, simply right-click on any message to see a pop-up preview of it’s contents. From here, you can decide to read the whole message, Archive the message, or Delete it.
If you have hotkeys enabled you can open the preview by pressing “h”. There are also a few other actions you can take, including:
- <Shift> + t : Add to tasks
- s : Star conversation
- <Shift> + i : Mark as Read
- <Shift> + u : Mark as unread