How do you use Gmail?

Google offers the best web-based email service out there with it’s large storage capacity, snappy ajax interface and threaded conversations.  I find myself tweaking my Gmail experience pretty often and looking through the labs section every few weeks to see what new features they are playing around with.

I’d like to share what I feel works best for me and would love to hear suggestions from others as well so we can all have a better gmail experience.

Lets run through my current workflow.

1. Always archive – I’m an inbox zero fan which means every piece of relevant email I receive is archived at some point. In Gmail, archiving just gets that piece of mail out of your inbox, you can still search or browse all of your mail to find any mail that you have archived.  With around 7 GB’s of storage space it’s pretty hard to fill that up even when you archive all of your mail.
2. Multiple inboxes – When this Gmail labs feature came out I didn’t see very many good uses for it and the examples they gave poorly demonstrated the use of it.  Also, the vertical split which is the default of multiple inboxes is horrible, switch to the horizontal.  I ended up breaking my multiple inboxes down into the following boxes:
   1. Inbox – The normal inbox which sits at the top.
   2. Starred(todos) – Any piece of email that requires action or a response goes in here.
   3. Need Later – I have a label named “needlater” that I use for any piece of mail that I’ll need to quickly pull up that information for later.
   4. Follow up – Since I send and archive every piece of mail this section helps out with the more pressing issues that I need to make sure I get a response from.
   5. Tickets & Receipts – Tickets for events that I’ll need to print out later as well as UPS tracking numbers or pending order information usually goes in here. This section is similar to the “needlater” section but is slightly different since it usually needs to be printed or just referenced on some external site.
3. Send & Archive – Enable this Gmail labs feature to archive your emails right after sending them automatically.
4. Multiple Signatures – In Gmail you can set a default signature in your settings but Gmail doesn’t have that great of support for multiple signatures. For instance, when I change the from address from info@example.com to nick@example.com the signature should be swapped out for the correct signature. The closest solution to this though is to use the “Canned Responses” gmail labs feature and store each one of your signatures in there. I keep my default signature in the settings section and then just replace it when needed with the proper canned response.
5. Nested Labels - This fairly new labs feature allows you to create a hierarchy of labels, similar to folders.
6. Other notable lab features – Google calendar gadget, google docs gadget, message sneak peak and undo send.

Also, learning the keyboard shortcuts for gmail is a big time saver too, there’s even a labs feature that lets you assign custom keyboard shortcuts.

Search operators also come in very handy especially when you archive all of your email. Here’s a list of all of the search operators for gmail. Here are a few search commands that you can use within gmail:

• is:chat – search your chat logs only. e.g. – “is:chat twitter”
• after:, before: – search for messages sent before or after a certain date. e.g. – “after:01/01/2010″
• has:attachment – only messages that have an attachment. e.g. “sent:bob has:attachment”

The only thing really missing from gmail now is a send later feature which is a highly requested feature and even Matt Cutts mentioned it as a must have feature for gmail at some point. Although this was back in 2008 so not sure if this will ever get released.

What does your Gmail setup look like?