Google has announced a new feature within its Gmail email service dubbed Smart Labels, which assist users in classifying and organising their email.

 

Smart Labels will automatically categorise incoming Bulk, Notification as well as Forum messages and then label these accordingly.

 

“Bulk” email, like the name suggests is mass emails including newsletters and promotional email, whilst “Notifications” are messages and receipts sent that has been sent to users directly, the likes of Twitter notifications. Email from group mailing lists gets classified as “Forums”.

 

 

“If you already use filters and labels to organize your mail, you may find that you can replace your existing filters with Smart Labels,” said Stanley Chen, a Google software engineer, in a blogpost. “If you’re picky like me and still want to hold on to your current organization system, Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too.”

 

“On the Filters tab under Settings, you’ll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox (which you can also do by just clicking on the label, then selecting or unselecting the checkbox in the top right corner).”

 

Users can enable this function on the Labs tab within Gmail’s settings.