Gmail Tips & Tricks

Here are a few things that make managing my gmail easier

Turn on stars and keyboard shortcuts #

Two must-enable features are multi-stars and keyboard shortcuts. Both of them are displayed one after the other in the settings page.

Turn them on and drag the stars you want to use in order. I suggest the following:

The meanings I associate to each star are:

• yellow-star: to be sorted
• yellow-bang: to do
• red-bang: important to do
• blue-info: info / reference
• purple-question: awaiting reply
• blue-star: memorable message

Note: If you do a lot of delegation, use orange-guillemet

After saving the changes, if you press s repeatedly on the keyboard with either a mail selected (in list view), or on the mail detail page, it will cycle through the stars, allowing you to assign a specific meaning to the email (or set of emails).

If you want to use Zapier for automation of some of this:

• yellow-star: l:^ss_sy
• yellow-bang: l:^ss_cy
• red-bang: l:^ss_cr
• blue-info: l:^ss_cb
• purple-question: l:^ss_cp
• blue-star: l:^ss_sb

Others, FYI:

• red-star: l:^ss_sr
• orange-star: l:^ss_so
• green-star: l:^ss_sg
• purple-star: l:^ss_sp
• orange-guillemet: l:^ss_co
• green-check: l:^ss_cg

Remove transactional / tool-based / notification emails #

After getting between 150-300 of these emails daily, this is my solution.

1. Create appropriate Gmail labels and filters
   • tools is for any emails from tools (Gitlab, Mongo, DevOps pipelines, Fastlane, Google/Apple stores, etc.)
   • calendar is for any invites, updates, declines, accepts for any meeting or event
   • support is for any support tickets where I have no actions and it is FYI
   • paperwork is for other security tickets or internal emails which are more for reference
2. Create Alfred snippet for searching for all mails with the appropriate labels
   • name: labels
   • keyword: @@label
   • snippet: in:inbox AND (label:tools OR label:calendar OR label:support OR label: label:paperwork OR "Out of Office") AND -is:starred AND has:userlabels
3. Keyboard combination to remove those mails from the inbox:
   / @@label enter *a I e *n gi
   • / should put focus in the search box
   • @@label should autocomplete with the search / appropriate labels
   • *a select all mails
   • shift + i mark as read
   • e archive
   • *n deselect all mails
   • gi go back to inbox