I suspect anyone who supports tags doesn’t have experience with a lot of email for work or organizations, all of which you have to keep up with at different paces. At the same time, I often don’t look at one email from a list at a time; I frequently need to refer to recently sent emails which are not in the same conversation JUST FROM THAT LIST. I really need folders for this. OR, just put a list of your tags on the side of the screen so you can sort by them easily. That’s really the only difference. Tags are a bitch to sort by.

Bottom line, just give us the option – conversations on/off, folders or tags. It makes life easy for everyone.

Folders organize and make for easier searching. Labels only make for easier searching. I’ll give you an example, if you have a PC this will make sense, if you have a mac sell it and buy an iPhone(great machine, still has typical Apple flaws). Imagine you go into windows explorer. Imap folders are just like folders in windows explorer they separate and group files from or with one another. Label are like the details at the top of the file explorer. If I click on “Name” it will order all the files in alphabetical order. Click it again and it will reverse the order. I could also do this for “Date Modified,” “Size,” etc. No imagine that you only had one folder on your hard drive “C:\.” That’s it. Every single file you ever created, edited, viewed, played right there in front of your face. It’s not organized, it’s cluttered.

I remember when all the search engines were emerging and making a name for themselves, Google rose to the top over other search engines, that had much bigger bank accounts(AOL, etc) at the time. They did this with an uncluttered interface which mad for quicker searches, and better search results. This may seem a little harsh but it seems like now they are trying to pull an “Apple” and control every aspect, with little options.

In conclusion(someone else previously said this):
-Folders work good to organize
-Labels work great to search
-How bout let me use both(folders containing e-mails that are labeled) P.S. If you don’t want to use folders no one will make you.
-If that’s to much for you to handle, Google, give me an option to use folders, or labels.

Having said that: How can I get my email to move to a label instead of being labeled when moving from a email client? YES an email client, HTML is not much of an interactive programming language. Clients work better, they are an actual program. Not a document inside of a program such as webmail.

Automatically removing emails from your inbox and placing them in a separate folder is a useful tool. I’m signed up for a couple of different listservs, some of which send me 20-30 emails a day. I don’t want all that crap clogging up my inbox and making it hard for me to easily see my important work emails. So having a filter which automatically moves it to a different folder instead of just giving it a lame tag is crucial.

I note you also fail to provide an example where your folders would be useful.
what *do* *you* use a hierachy for in emails?
(i don’t use one, so don’t know an example situation where it would be useful)

holding ctrl down creates duplicates of a message – which is hardly the same thing

ps : that’s a stupid way to try to use tags

TechCrunch posted an article about the interface overhaul over at Google Documents, welcoming the introduction of ‘folders’. In this article, Duncan Riley, talks about how it’s great that Google is finally embracing folders and wonder…

BTW, there is a very simple way to put a message in multiple folders: in Outlook when you drag a message to a folder, press Ctrl and it will be copied. So you can put a copy in each “category”. Because of disk space, it would be nicer if this would only create a link to the message, which would only be saved into one of the folders (links are a 35-40 years old invention), but space should not matter on gmail anyway.

my example for labels : email to Gran about her birthday, email to Dad about his birthday
you can see your emails about birthdays or all your emails to Gran, etc

Re: Folders in Gmail
only if they don’t take away labels

How about if Gmail adds the option to create a hierarchy of folders under “All Mail”, which are independent of labels. Each user could then use either labels or folders (or both), according to personal preference. Also, add drag and drop from Inbox to any folder, which is the same as pressing the Archive button to send to All Mail.

http://www.peti...s/petition.html

To read more about the proposal, please go to: gideongoldin.googlepages.com/directorypetition

I can’t see that Gmail would stop the option to tag, but I would find it useful to be able to put things in folders too.

That’s why I like Thunderbird – I can have folders, but I can also have virtual folders – which are rather like tags, as something can be in many folders at the same time – but, I can also have the equivalent of Misc – which I can only create in Gmail by actively tagging things – whereas with Thunderbird, once something is in a folder, I can just see the remainder in the inbox.

For me, IF Gmail were to introduce an easy way to tag things that had no other tag automatically (if you want it), then it would be useful. Alternatively, if it had folders, then I could see what’s not in a particular category & find it quickly.

Yes, tagging is useful – most of the time, but there are things that it doesn’t quite work for (especially when you’re trying to set up filters to auto-tag/ auto archive things), and then I’d like something that addresses that problem.

- In the default view, just drag a doc into as many folders as you want (one at a time) and it’ll be in all of them.
- In folder views, dragging a document moves it OUT of that folder and into another one. If you want to add it to an *additional* folder, click the check box next to it, then select a folder from the Add to Folder drop-down box.

So it’s basically the best of all worlds I’d think . People who love drag-and-drop can enjoy that, folks who are more comfortable with “folders” are happy, and tag-lovers can basically treat the folders as tags or labels and add as many per doc as they like.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but am not on the Docs team… just a very enthusiastic user of the product

Folders in Gmail will give an opportunity to add my documents in an orderly manner and not piled up in one window. It will be great to tag easily, by just typing a tag in the “tag” area of message and not through drop down menu. It sickens me to use tags the way Google has implement it now, what were they thinking. Folders and Tags are essentially two different things in my mind and one complements each other and not other way around.