Google Mail Labels. Maxlength=40. Jul 07. 082
Well after hearing from Darren that he was switching in full to using Google for business email I decided to investigate myself. Google have a fantastic offer for small businesses; up to 25 mail accounts with a 6Gb limit ‘each’ which runs through your own domain.
It’s all pretty easy to set up though if you have a lot of existing email to import (how about 3Gb) then it can be quite painful!
I start shifting email across a few days back, starting with folders containing email to prospects then working my way slowly through my client folders, which are organised by client and job number. This is where I hit a big snag. Google Mail does not support folders (or labels as they call them) which have names that are longer than 40 characters. So as much as I would love to use Google for Mail because I might have a folder called ‘Clients’ with a sub folder called ‘John Smith Tractors’ and a folder inside that called ‘J123 – Website Development’ I am well and truly stuck.
Nothing I can do about it unless I want to spend hours renaming all my folders, shortening the names or manually re-labeling all the email to use multiple labels once inside Google Mail.
If only there was a script that turned ‘folders with sub folders’ into ‘multiple labels’ then I would be saved.
Well, labels are actually far more clever than folders as you can ‘label’ an email as belonging to a particular client then also relating to a particular subject. Think about how much more flexible tagging is than categorising. Labels are just tags by another name.
If you connect to Google Mail via IMAP your labels are represented as folders so you can actually create sub folders that are visible via an IMAP client by labeling something as “label1/label2”.
Finally, I think the problem is actually with the fact that mail clients do not provide in built support for tags. It really is a much more powerful way to organise data. That being said, the 40 char limit is daft and they should lift it to at least 256 chars.
Google Lable is really a mess. Goolge should come up with the folder concept like yahoo or other mails. I wish Google will work on this to give us folders in mail.