Organise mail with labels

Folders hold a conversation in one place. Labels let you tag it with as many topics as you like, for example Clients and Urgent together, and then find it under either one.

Create your labels

1. Open Settings and choose Labels.
2. Type a name in New label name, for example Clients, and choose Add.
3. A colour is picked for you. Click any of the colour dots beside the label to change it.

You can have up to 100 labels. Names can be up to 60 characters. To rename a label, edit its name in the list and click away; it stays on the same messages. The label list is saved on your account, so it looks the same on every device you sign in on.

Put labels on a conversation

1. Open a conversation in Mail.
2. Choose Labels in the toolbar above the message.
3. Tick the labels you want, or type a new name in the box at the bottom of the menu and press the plus button to make one on the spot. The label chips appear under the subject.

Remove a label the same way by unticking it.

Find labelled mail

• Under Labels in the Mail sidebar, click a label to see every conversation that carries it.
• In the search box, type label: followed by the name to search by label.

Labels only appear in the sidebar once you have created at least one.

Labels or folders?

• A conversation sits in one folder at a time, such as Inbox or Archive.
• A conversation can have many labels at once.

Use folders to say where something lives and labels to say what it is about. You can also create new folders from the sidebar with the Create new folder button.

Let filters label mail for you

A filter can add a label automatically as mail arrives. For example, add the label Invoices to anything from your supplier. The article on filters has the full steps.

Deleting a label

Deleting removes it from your list only. Messages that already had the label keep a hidden tag until you remove it from them, so delete a label last, after taking it off the mail you care about.

Common problems

• "There's already a label with that name." Names are matched ignoring capitals and accents, so Clients and clients count as the same.
• My label shows in Mail but not in my phone's mail app. Labels are stored on the messages as tags, so other mail apps may show them as keywords or not at all.