For some time, Google has offered a label feature that allows you to ‘tag’ any inbound or outbound email traffic with a label so you can better organize your mail. For people like me who use the browser exclusively for e-mail this is a major benefit. While I’ve found great value for labeling particular conversations I’d like to keep for posterity, I’ve used the labeling feature extensively to manage the daily barrage of offers, promos, newsletters, ‘freebies’, etc. I have not-so-intelligently signed up for over the years. So on Wednesday, I was delighted to find a little ‘hint’ introducing Google’s new feature: showing you only the labels that you use the most and allowing you to ‘drag-and-drop’ labels onto messages and vice versa. Now, this may not seem like much, but to me, the benefits are unmistakable

See below for a quick screen grab from one of my Google accounts — unfortunately, on the one account I use the most showing the cacophony of my 100+ labels I had already ‘accepted’ the hint before screen grabbing.

So, how does this little feature help me?

1. I immediately know which labels matter for me
2. I immediately know which ’sign-ups’ are really not that active
3. The stuff that is hidden is *probably* something I can consider deleting, unsubscribing, or sending straight to the ‘bit bucket’
4. The real estate it frees up for me to try other Google widgets is unmistakable (depending on the functionality, i can probably plug in 2-4 more widgets)

So, how might Google benefit from this new feature?

1. I may actually go through and start unsubscribing/deleting from all of the junk I’ve signed up for, thereby, perhaps saving Google infrastructure costs on storage, bandwidth and the like (the obvious cost benefit having been made for money saved from encouraging mail pruning/un-subscription/not ‘learning’ what ads to serve me from some of my content vs. tipping the scale to a ‘pay-for-storage’ account)
2. With the added real estate, Google may get me to try new features that may allow them to serve me more relevant ads/charge me more money

Or, it could simply be that users felt that all labels being visible and eating up precious screen real estate. Maybe the labeling process was too cumbersome for messages that you want to tag with existing labels … Dunno.

Either way, if its was not intended as a way for you and me to reduce my storage space and demands on Google’s infrastructure,  its a nice armament in the war on spam.

Technorati Tags: gmail, gmail labels, gmail features, gmail spam, email spam, email storage, gmail storage