Mountain View, California — Just less than a month after introducing an offline version of Gmail, Google last week tossed in a new enhancement that pumps up filters and labels to help keep your e-mail organized. The new feature called “Multiple Inboxes,” which allows users to see up to four lists of e-mail messages in addition to your inbox, all on one screen.
The new Multiple Inboxes feature can be activated on Gmail’s Labs page: Once you log in to Gmail, select “Settings,” go to the “Labs” tab and check the Multiple Inboxes box. To make changes to the default view, go into Settings and click on the “Multiple Inboxes” tab, which should now be visible.
An image is worth a thousand words, so after enabling the Multiple Inboxes tab, here is how the inbox looks like:
incoming messages, one pane for starred messages, one pane for messages with a particular label, one for drafts, and so on. It was developed by software engineer Octavian “Vivi” Costache as a Gmail Labs experiment.
“All the email I get related to Flash goes under my ‘flash’ label, everything about paragliding goes under ‘flying,’ and they all skip my inbox because that is how I like to stay organized,” he wrote in a blog post. “But when new email arrives I have to switch to the ‘flash’ label first, then click on ‘paragliding,’ etc. I wanted a way to see it all at once.”
With Multiple Inboxes, you “spend less time monitoring important messages so that you can see all your different lists at a glance,” he wrote.
“You can configure according to your viewing preference, in addition to setting up the number of messages displayed and the positioning of your panels from the Multiple Inboxes section under Settings,” Costache wrote.
Once activated, then you can select up to five different panes to display to the right of your Gmail inbox, above your inbox, or below it. For label and filter junkies, the Multiple Inboxes feature is a must.
For example, you are on the mailing lists for Sony’s Playstation Network or Microsoft’s Xbox.com newsletter. While you may want to view them later, though sometimes e-mail such as these just pile up and get in the way. So, rather than unsubscribing and losing out on gaming news, you can just apply filters and labels to clean up your inbox. Create a label like “gaming,” for example, and then create a filter to mark every “gaming” message as read. Then when you have time to go through the latest gaming news, you simply click on the label in your Gmail pane and all the labeled messages pop up. Multiple Inboxes takes this to the next level by allowing you to see your “gaming” label every time you open up your inbox.
For the sensibly-organized people, it is a killer feature that demonstrates why Gmail is still far ahead of competing web-based e-mail services.