It may seem useless or simple, but apparently people don’t know their way around Labels on Gmail. Labels are a simple way to organize your emails so that work is separated from friends, friends are separated from dorks, and so on. In this tutorial I’m going to go over how to make labels, how to make all existing emails get labeled, and how to make incoming emails get labeled automatically through the use of filters.

Labels are very handy. Using Labels you can sort out your emails fast. Say you are looking for an email chain from a teacher that you got a few weeks ago. Rather than scrolling through your inbox or “All Mail” sections to try and find them, or searching by typing keywords, Just click your “School” label and there it is.

	To start we have to make some labels. Click “Edit Labels” on the left side of your screen, or go to “Settings” in the right top corner. In Settings click on the “Labels” tab. Here you can see any labels you already have (with the number of conversations/emails under each label) and you can make new labels. Let’s make a new label “Dumbass”.
	Click “Create” and your new Label should appear on the list. But now you still need to apply the label to all the emails that are in your inbox and fit, and you want to make it automatically set the label when you receive the emails.
	In “Settings” go to “Filters”. Here you can make emails you receive automatically have labels. Scroll down and click “Create a new filter”.

The first step to creating a filter is to distinguish which emails coming in should be chosen. In this case I’m going to say all emails from Kornel (In the box write the actual email of the person) should be filtered. You have a few other choices as well. Emails with a certain keyword or subject for example. Once I’ve written in my defining characteristic I click “Next Step”.

We then must decide what we want the filter to do. If you want all emails to be starred, or to be marked as read, this is the place to do it. What’s more is by clicking “Apply the label” and selecting the appropriate label we can make it so that all emails filter get the label. Here I make it so that all emails from Kornel are automatically put under our Dumbass label.

Near the bottom we can check mark the “Also apply filter to ___ conversations below” so that all existing emails that fit the description are filed under the label as well. By clicking this I make the 72 emails with Kornel I already have get filed under our label. We then click “Create Filter” and are done.

You now have completed your first label and filter. Any email from your selected person will now be caught by your filter, and put under your label. Your emails will still appear in your inbox (unless your filter says otherwise), but now you have a way to organize your various emails. Searching is easier with labels such as Work, and Family, and etc. If you need to narrow it down just click on the label and it’ll show all the emails under that label.

As the last cherry-on-top label trick, go to the left of your screen where your labels are listed and click on the box next to them. Here you can change the color of your labels. Emails with labels will have this color setting so they’re easy to find among other emails. Plus it makes your Gmail look so spiffy!