Labels and Nested Labels

[Michael Methot]

Hi folks, I'm having some issues with my labels, I'm not sure if it's me thinking all screwy or if this is an actual issue, but I hope you folks can tell me. 

Essentially what I am having issues with is when I add a nested label (or several) to a parent label, the emails from the nested labels don't show up when I click on the parent label. Here's a quick example.

Social Media

    -Facebook

        -Notifications

            -Requests

            -Fishville

        -Groups

            -Care2Action

            -Gmail Rocks

    -Twitter

        -Tweets

        -Requests

Hope that shows up properly on your ends. :/ Anywhoo. it makes sense to me that when I click on "Social Media", I would see everything nested under it (ie. All emails from all my Social Media accounts). If I were to click on "Notifications", I would see all emails under "Requests" and "Fishville". The same would apply if I were to click on "Facebook", I would expect to see all the emails I've ever received from Facebook. 

I just deleted all my old labels, which were a mess, and I am starting from scratch. The way I am setting it up is to make new label/s from my inbox using the appropriate drop down menus (or if the label already exists, skip to the next part), and then I check the email I want to put there, click more, and apply filter. I set up the filter accordingly, perform a test search, select "Apply Label" and select the relevant nested label, check the "Include all other conversations shown below" box, and hit save. <---- Let's say I was organizing my Fishville emails there. 

While this takes care of adding those emails to the appropriate label without a hitch (clicking on "Fishville" shows all my Fishville emails), any parent labels or sub-parent labels (ie. "Facebook" and "Notifications") will show a blank window with the message "There are no conversations with this label."

Sorry for the overkill on the explanation, I just wanted to make sure you folks understood what I was think so you tell me if I'm properly crazy for expecting Gmail to behave like a standard file explorer or if something really is wrong. Many thanks for any help you can provide. 

[Zack (Doc)]

Nested labels don't work that way.  Nesting is really only for the purpose of easing your onscreen organizing.  Each label is essentially unique.  "Social Media/Facebook/Notifications/Requests" is just one label, and is NOT labelled "Social Media" for example.

Since multiple labels can exist on any message/conversation, to accomplish what you're looking for, just add the extra labels you are wanting.  So grab everything in "Requests" and apply the labels above it as well.  I've done this with my kids mail to achieve the same results you're looking for.

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[Michael Methot]

I was really hoping you wouldn't say that. Thanks for the reply nevertheless. Is this something that is severely lacking, or does the Gmail crowd have other techniques I am yet unaware of for micromanaging their email?

[Andy]

> Is this something that is severely lacking,

I wouldn't say "severely lacking", but it is something that isn't part
of Gmail. You just don't depend on finding messages with labels that
you didn't attach to them. You'll get used to it. I don't mind it.
At first I think I was surprised that it didn't work differently, but
I quickly got over it.

With a few filters, you can attach as many labels as you want, to
every message. The main disadvantage (to me) is that having multiple
labels crowds out the subject when I am in the list view.

For me, nesting labels area way of managing my mailbox which has
literally dozens of labels (different email lists, topics, etc.).
Before we had nested labels I had one very long list of labels. With
nesting, they are organized into categories, and I can find them much
more readily. Works for me.

In your original question you made reference to File Explorer. Nested
labels work exactly like that (only more flexible). If a file is in
subfolder B, which is a child or subdirectory of folder A, then that
file is found only in B and not also in A. Looking in A won't find a
file that is in one of its sub-folders.

Andy

[Michael Methot]

Thanks for the reply Andy.

I don't know how I managed  to reference what I wanted to how file explorer works. You are indeed correct, if one opened a parent directory they should only see the sub-folders, not the contents  of the sub-folders and sub-sub-folders... that would kind of defeat the purpose. I really don't know what I was thinking at the time.

Anyways, I am trying to recall where I have seen something akin to what I described in the past. It just makes sense in my head, and I know that's because I have used something like that in the past.

The real reason I asked is because I like to auto archive a good bunch of my "fun" stuff. Newsletters, gaming news, delivery coupons, social media stuff... .you get  the point, so just the important stuff is immediate available to peruse. But it makes sense to me that if I have a couple of emails from each of my social media accounts that I want to bring up I should just click on social media, instead of having to drill down through twenty different folders to be able to view everything.

I also like to micromanage my email, as you probably noticed, so I might get five or six emails from one website, but they are all about different topics. That makes for a lot nested labels.

Oh well, off to reorganize my head.

Cheers

[Andy]

For me, where Gmail's handling of nested labels has shortcomings, is
when I search within a label. Only messages in that label are
searched, not any sub-labels. I know that many email programs search
the contents of a folder including sub-folders and down.

Andy

[Sean Murphy]

    Then just make the filters that apply the overall labels include the criteria for the sub-labels. Then any search within the overall label will return results from the sub-labels as well.

[Andy]

>     Then just make the filters that apply the overall labels include the
> criteria for the sub-labels. Then any search within the overall label will
> return results from the sub-labels as well.

?? I'm not following you.

Are you saying there is an easy way to make a search include
sub-labels, without specifying each and every sub-label?

Andy

[Sean Murphy]

    I'm saying if you apply the label to everything with the sub-label, a search for the label won't miss items with the sub-label.

[Michael Methot]

For me, where Gmail's handling of nested labels has shortcomings, is
when I search within a label.  Only messages in that label are
searched, not any sub-labels.  I know that many email programs search
the contents of a folder including sub-folders and down.

That's almost exactly what I was referencing, except your  way actually is actually executing a search for a single email or topic or address... yes when you execute a search on a parent directory it should definetly search the (child? so tired right now lol) directories as well.

In my case, I would like to be able not view (as I stated earlier and was probably a bad word to use), but "execute" a search by just clicking on the parent folder, and it shows all new emails (or  even all mail) for all the sub directories under the parent, and maximizing the parent label in the left pane would allow you to manually drill down to the desired sub directory you want to "search".

 tomato tomahto, as they say, but thank you for helping me more clearly state exactly what I am looking for. Hopefully it makes more sense now. It would be nice if Gmail could implement something like that, as Gmails motto (one of them, anyways) is "Search, don't sort."

Now that has me thinking though, does anyone know a search query or string that would search a label and all nested labels? There has to be something. Does anyone know how to look at the source code for a nested label? I'm sure if you could find exactly how Gmail interprets a label and nested labels, one could make a relevant query to search them.

If I'm just being crazy, tell me to shut up and drop it already, I won't mind. :P

[Michael Methot]

Crap, my undo button didn't work. :/

I didn't mean to sound like I was taking what Andy said and seemingly coming up with an idea all on my own. What I meant was I was thinking about finding how Gmail views labels and nested labels, and making a proper query to search the Parent and all nested labels, which Andy pointed out doesn't seem possible at the moment. So props to him for putting me on that train of thought.

[Andy]

Sean Murphy wrote:
>     I'm saying if you apply the label to everything with the sub-label, a
> search for the label won't miss items with the sub-label.

Yes, that is indeed the work-around for my problem, and I would have
done that if it were important enough. But as I think I've said (if
not hinted), I would not like to do that. One of the disadvantages,
is that multiple labels crowd out the Subject line when you are in
list mode. I think I can turn off displaying labels in list mode,
which I don't want to do because it is all-or-none and I rely on
seeing at least the furthest-down label (and the subject) to see what
the message is about. And it can become a Filter nightmare if your
labels are nested several levels deep (every Filter really requires
adding four to six or more).

So like I say, it is an unfortunate thing that Gmail doesn't have the
capability to search down through sub-labels (like other email
programs do do); but I'll live with that.

Andy

[Kenneth Ayers]

You can select to show or hide individual labels in the conversation listing.  Just go to the manage labels settings page and click on either Show or Hide in the "Show in message list" column.

[Andy]

> You can select to show or hide individual labels in the conversation
> listing.  Just go to the manage labels settings page and click on either
> Show or Hide in the "Show in message list" column.

So THAT'S what that one means! I hadn't bothered to figure it out yet.

Thanks!

Andy

[Kenneth Ayers]

I too was wondering what that option was for till I finally gave up and read the help page. 

I was hoping there was a way to hide labels in the Labels and Move to drop-down lists.  You can hide them in the label listing at the left but not those drop-downs.  I'd think being able to hide them there as well would be useful.  If you have a lot of labels, those drop-down lists can get a bit unwieldy.

Andy

[J Dobbs]

sorry to be a bit late on replying LOL, but i have wonder the same question. After experimenting, this is how you do it. When you bring down the search menu filters.  In the "has words" box type in:  

label:-Facebook OR label:-notifications OR label:-requests.... etc....  

Now once you click on Social Media, all those nested labels will appear on the parent label. let me know if it works if you ever respond back

[J Dobbs]

ok

On Monday, September 5, 2011 at 5:19:23 PM UTC-5, Stryker wrote: