Droid X: The Missing Manual

Understanding Gmail’s Organization

Gmail has its own terminology and worldview when it comes to handling email, so you have new some terms and ideas to get used to. Here are the most common Gmail concepts:

• Labels. Think of these as email folders. Your regular email program has a folder called Inbox, for example, and lets you create other folders, such as Family, Work, and so on. Gmail calls these email containers labels.

  That said, there is a slight underlying difference between the way you work with Gmail’s labels and how you work with your email program’s folders. In your typical email program, you might move mail between folders by dragging them. Not so in Gmail. In Gmail, you affix a label to an email message. When you do that, that email automatically appears when you sort for that label.

  Labels actually give you more flexibility than folders, since you can attach multiple labels to a single email message to have it show up in multiple labels. For example, if you get an email from your brother about advice for your upcoming trip to France, you can add the labels Family and France to the email. That email then shows up in both your Family label, and your France label.

  Tip

  The Droid X Gmail app is designed to work in concert with Gmail on the Web. So you can’t do everything in the Gmail app that you can do on the Web. The Droid X Gmail app can’t create labels, for example, so to create new ones, you must visit your Gmail account on the Web, either using the Droid X browser, or a computer. ...