Editing mail with Geary

Labels Instead of Folders

Google's Gmail service not only ensured that its users avoided having to amass a lot of disk space, but it also provided a whole new concept for storage. Up to then, web services and mail programs alike used the time-worn method of organizing messages into folders.

Gmail uses a different method. Purely physically incoming mail ends up in a common directory. You then impose the real structure as "labels."

The service distinguishes between user-defined and system-defined, unchangeable labels. Messages that you delete go into the system label Trash , for example.

To create a label in Geary, click the message in the list and then click the label icon on the toolbar. Currently, there's no way to assign your own labels in the software, but it reads labels created in email accounts with no problem. To apply other labels or edit them, the only way is to log in to your account via the web. Once you assign a label to a message, it disappears from the Inbox.

Finding Messages

The Internet and technical magazines are full of different tips and strategies for working with email. One thing experts agree on is that it's generally not a good idea to keep mail in the Inbox indefinitely, because you want to return to it or edit it some time in the future.

If a message is important, Geary has two options: You apply a label to it, or you "star" it (i.e., give it importance) by clicking its star icon in the conversation list. A message marked as read stays in its original folder. You can subsequently apply a label and move the message to another place in Geary. The Starred label includes all the messages marked as such.