Tip of the Week: Managing your OIB folders in Gmail and Yahoo! Mail

November 17 2010, 5:01pm

Using Organizer is kind of like having your very own personal email assistant! Email comes into your Gmail or Yahoo account, Organizer automatically places them in preset labels or folders. The folders have “OIB” at the beginning; for example – OIB Finance, OIB Shopping, etc. TIP- Organizer ignores any Gmail or Yahoo! Mail folders that do not start with “OIB”.

Want to change which folders a sender will go to? It’s super simple to change which folder a sender is assigned to. Organizer is easily trained! For example, Amazon emails are automatically assigned the OIB/Shopping label, but you’d like them to show up in OIB/Home. Here’s how! For Yahoo!Mail Users, you can do this easily in one of two ways- 1. Click on Automatic Organizer in the application list located in the bottom left hand corner.

Locate Amazon in your sender list. Click-and-hold on the “handle” to the left of the sender. While holding down on the mouse button, drag the sender to the new OIB folder you want this sender to use. In this case, OIB/Home. 2. Simply drag and drop a message from that Amazon to the OIB/Home folder. This short video explains it all!

For Gmail Users, it’s a easy, one step process- 1. Simply find an email from Amazon and remove the label OIB/Shopping and apply the label OIB/Home. Organizer takes it from there! TIP- You can have multiple labels in Gmail if you want your emails to show up in two different spots. Too many labels on Gmail? You can hide them or nest them! With OIB labels, the list of labels in Gmail may become a bit lengthy. Here are two ways to manage them easily. 1- Hiding OIB Labels- You can control which OIB labels are visible by going to Settings, Labels, and choosing which labels you want to see when Gmail loads. Clicking hide next to any label will hide it from the default view.

This is a great way to highlight your most important labels so they stand out when you open Gmail! 2. Nesting labels in Gmail- This is one of our favorite tips for Gmail! You may have noticed the slash in OIB labels; ie – OIB/Shopping. Why did we do this? So OIB labels will nest in a nice manner. Try it out! 1. Go to Settings, Labs (or click the green flask icon next to Settings) 2. Find the lab called “Nested Labels” and click Enable. 3. The result is nested labels that can be collapsed and expanded right inside of Gmail!

TIP- Nested OIB labels over IMAP. If you read your Gmail messages over IMAP, OIB labels will group together under a parent folder named OIB. Depending on your email client, you may be able to collapse and expand this folder. This helps keep the folder list in your email client organized and tidy.

Training Organizer to work better for you couldn’t be any simpler. Don’t forget, you can also easily create customized folders for Organizer! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions don’t hesitate to send us an email at help@otherinbox.com or ping us at @OtherInbox on Twitter. We’ll leave the servers on for you!