Tips and Tricks for Editing and Managing the Top 13 Gmail Labels

You can add Labels to Gmail to identify what’s important and organize them systematically. Gmail offers you several predefined labels like Trash, Spam, and Draft. We will share tips to help you create new Gmail labels to categorize and organize all your current and incoming emails.

One of the great things about tags is that a single email can have multiple tags. For example, you can create labels for email based on task priority (high priority, low priority), people (admin, editor), subject, type, and more.

Here are some helpful tips on how to edit and manage labels in Gmail.

Where Do You See Tags

You can view labels from the left sidebar in the web version of Gmail. Click on any label to view the emails inside. Alternatively, you will find labels before the email subject in the email list.

When you open the email, you will also find labels next to the email subject.

1. Create Labels in Gmail

There are two ways to create labels from the Gmail website. First, open Gmail and click Create new label from the left sidebar. If you can’t see it directly, click More > Create new tag.

The new tag popup will open. Type the name of your tag and click Create. The new tag will appear in the left sidebar.

Another way to create labels is from the email itself. Let’s say you are reading an email and you want to attach it to a tag. But you cannot find a suitable tag. You can instantly create a label.

To do this, open the email. Click the Tag icon at the top and select Create new tag from the menu. Type the name and press Create.

Note: You can’t create, edit, or delete labels in the Gmail Android app. However, you can do this in the iOS app.

2. Add Tags to Emails

Once you’ve created the labels, it’s time to apply them to your emails. For this, open the required e-mail. Click the Tags icon. Check the box next to the labels you want to apply to your email and hit the Apply button.

When you apply a label to an email, the Inbox, Update, etc. continues to have one of the existing tags, such as Adding a tag does not remove it from these folders. So you can access it from the primary inbox and the added label. In case you want to remove emails from existing tags, check how to move tags in the next section.

Fly: Learn what a Forum is and how to create one in Gmail.

3. Move Email to Label

If you want a clean inbox, you can remove your Inbox label emails and keep them in their dedicated labels only. When you do this, you will only find the emails under the labels attached to it, not in the primary inbox.

You can move an email to a label in three ways. First, open the required email and click on the Move icon. Select the required tag from the menu.

Second, add the required tag to your email first. Then click the cross icon next to the labels you want to remove the email from. Let’s say Inbox. Keep only the tags you want the email to appear with.

Finally, drag and drop the email from the email list to the required label in the left sidebar.

Fly: Learn what archive is and how to archive emails in Gmail.

4. Add Color to Labels

You can color labels to easily identify your emails. For example, you can use the color red for high priority emails or add brand colors to the labels, etc. Colored labels will appear in the email list.

To add color to any label, hover your mouse over the label from the left sidebar. Click the down arrow or the ellipsis icon next to the tag name. Select Label color from the menu. Then choose a color from the list. If you don’t like the colors offered, click Add custom color.

5. Rename Tags

To rename any tag, click the ellipsis icon next to the tag name in the left sidebar. Choose Edit. Then type a new name for your tag. It will be automatically applied to emails under this label.

6. Create Nested Tags

Nested tags are like subfolders. You have your main tag and you can create nested tags under it. This way, you can organize your emails much better. Email only appears in nested labels. However, the tag name will have the names of all parent tags attached to it. For example, electricity, gas, water etc. You can have a main Invoice tag followed by nested tags.

Fly: You can create multiple tag hierarchies, meaning you can have a subtag under a nested tag.

Click the three-dot icon next to the tag name to create a subtag under a tag. Select Add alt tag.

Alternatively, when creating a tag, you must have noticed the Nest tag under the new tag option. Check the box next to it and select the tag you want to be the alt tag.

Fly: To nest an existing tag, click the three-dot icon next to it. Choose Edit. Then select Nest tag under the popup window.

7. Remove Tag from Email

To remove a tag from an email, open the email. Now click on the cross icon next to the tag name to remove it. Alternatively, click the Remove tag button at the top. You can also uncheck tags you don’t need from the Tags option.

8. Remove Multiple Emails from One Label

Sometimes you want to remove a certain tag from multiple emails. If you use the above method, this will be time consuming. There is a better alternative.

Open the required label from the left sidebar in Gmail. You will find all emails with this label. Select the emails you want to remove the tag from. Once selected, click on the Remove tag button at the top.

9. Find Untagged Emails

Before removing tags, check the email for tags. If an email doesn’t have labels, you won’t find them in the Primary inbox. Such orphaned emails go to the All Mail folder, accessible from the left sidebar.

10. Combine Tags

Let’s say you want to merge emails from two existing Gmail labels into a new label. There are multiple ways to achieve this.

First, create a new tag. Then select all the emails in the first label and drag and drop them into the newly created label. Similarly, move emails from second label to new label. Then delete the first two tags.

Fly: You can use the Move option to move the tags instead of dragging and dropping them.

In the second method, you need to get help from Gmail’s search. First, create a new tag. Then enter the name of the tags you want to merge into the search bar. They must be in the format ‘tag:name1 OR tag:name2’ where name1 and name2 are the names of the tags. For example, label:notes OR label:GT. Select all the emails that appear in the search results. Drag and drop to the new label or use the Move option. Delete the original tags.

Fly: If your tag name has spaces, replace it with a dash -.

11. Automatically Add Tags to New Emails

With the help of Gmail filters, you can create a filter in which received emails that meet the filter criteria will automatically apply a certain label.

To do this, follow these steps:

Stage 1: Click the Settings icon in Gmail. Then select See all settings from the menu.

Step 2: Click on the Filters and blocked addresses tab. Then click Create a new filter.

Stage 3: Set the filter’s criteria in the popup window. You can use the Subject or From address of the email. Click Create filter.

Step 4: You will be prompted to choose an action for the filter. Check the box next to Apply tag and select the tag from the list. Click Create filter.

12. Show or Hide Tags

The left sidebar in Gmail can accommodate 500 labels. I’m pretty sure you won’t need that many labels. However, instead of deleting the tags, you can hide the tags from appearing in the left sidebar. You can view only required tags.

To do this, click on the label’s three-dot icon in the left sidebar. Check the box next to show/hide as needed, depending on your need. Alternatively, go to Gmail Settings > Labels. Here you will see all tags including System tags. Hide or show them according to your preference.

Fly: Learn how to create an email signature in Gmail.

13. Delete Tag

If you don’t need a tag at all, you can delete it. Deleting a tag does not delete associated emails. If added, they will continue to appear in other tags. However, if the tags are not added, you will find them under the All Mail folder as shown above.

Note: Deleting a tag deletes all of its subtags.

To delete a tag, open the menu from the tag’s three-dot icon. Select Remove tag. Alternatively, go to Gmail Settings > Label. Press Remove next to your tag.

Edit Gmail

Labels are just one of the ways to organize your Gmail inbox. Archive, tabs etc. You can use other features such as Check out our guide on how to organize Gmail efficiently.