Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
You know your situation better than I do, so take a few minutes and adjust
the GMail settings in the way that works best for you. From there we get
into serious stuf: saving, moving around, and deleting messages.
Forwarding, archiving, and deleting messages
How do you know what to forward, what to archive, and what to delete?
And how do you keep all that stuf you want to save without going crazy?
Forwarding
Here's how I handle it: For e-mail that I consider important, I set up ilters
to forward those messages to my cell phone, while keeping them on GMail
so that I can act on them later. hat way, when I'm not in front of a com-
puter, I can keep a heads-up idea in mind of things I should really address
immediately. I don't try to answer all my mail from my phone—I use it just
as an alerting service. Of course, if I'm monitoring something for friends or
clients, I usually end up forwarding a lot to them, too, although I wouldn't
do this via a ilter without their permission.
You should be a lot more conservative about forwarding to other people
than forwarding to yourself. You know how much information you can
handle. On the other hand, you don't want to lood your Mom or best buddy
or client with a bunch of information they don't have time to review.
Archiving
GMail ofers you over two gigabytes of storage. here's no real reason for
you to throw anything away. hat doesn't give you carte blanche to just
dump your messages in there every which way. Use the organizing feature
GMail ofers: Labels.
Labels are located on the let of the main page. You can edit them from there
or from the Settings page. You can also use ilters to automatically apply
labels to certain e-mails as they're coming in.
I strongly urge you to take a little time and think of an organizing theme
for your labels now. If I were monitoring several topics, I might create a
label for each topic. If I were just monitoring one topic, I might either put
everything in one label or break out my labels by the services I was monitor-
ing (Google Alerts, Watch hat Page, and so on). It doesn't matter what you
choose as long as it makes sense to you and you can apply it consistently as
you generate ilters.
 
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