Gmail – In Gmail, how to find all messages having more than one label applied

• The biggest disappointment many people have in Gmail is when we try to sort messages. There was never any way to sort by anything. It's always default to descending date. If you need to browse your mailbox in a different way, get IMAP and an email client. While I kinda agree with this approach, sometimes I do miss at least being able to sort dates in reversal order (oldest first).

  You can try and suggest it as a new feature. It's even already pre-suggested there! Maybe some time in the future we'll have it.

• The Move To drop down is there just because too many people were too lazy to re-learn how to manage their mailbox and requested folders. It's just a hack that actually does 2 commands at once: insert label "foo" and remove current label - which can be inbox, a system label. Similarly, Archive is a hack to remove inbox label.

Now, if you, reader, are willing to understand why Gmail is so different and so many people like it... Keep reading, including every link. ;-)

You really should learn more about Gmail labels. It's not just how to use them. It's a whole different organizational approach. In the long run you will enjoy much better if you structure your mails with labels rather than folders because there really is no need for folders once you get used to it - at least for a regular person mailbox. And, by the way, the idea is keeping the inbox empty through archiving.

Try to re-think how you handle your mailbox in general. There's no need to use a lot of old resources-on-how-to-find-mails such as folders and sorting because you can simply search. And so labels are all about adding keywords to most relevant items or to highlight them in another way.

The disadvantage labels used to have is that with too many of them, the labels menu can get messy for browsing (like you would browse folders). But that was "fixed" with nested labels. Actually a much better fix is using less labels or hiding the less used ones. We hardly ever need that many.

You need to set up your IMAP client as Google instruct in order for the Gmail labels to work. See Recommended IMAP client settings

If you client is one of (iPhone, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook) then click the link and read Google's specific instructions for those clients.

Otherwise, you need to configure your client as follows:

Sending:

• Do not save sent messages on the server. If your client is sending mail through Gmail's SMTP2 server, your sent messages will be automatically copied to the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder.
• DO save draft messages on the server. If you want your drafts in your mail client to sync correctly with Gmail's web interface, set your client to save drafts to the [Gmail]/Drafts folder.

Deleting:

• Do not save deleted messages on the server. Messages that are deleted from an IMAP folder (except for those in [Gmail]/Spam or [Gmail]/Trash) only have that label removed and still exist in All Mail. Hence, your client doesn't need to store an extra copy of a deleted message.
• Do not save deleted messages to your [Gmail]/Trash folder because this will delete a message in all folders.
• Do not save deleted messages to your [Gmail]/All Mail folder as some clients will try to empty this folder and ultimately fail. This can lead to delayed mail access or excessive battery consumption on a mobile device.

Junk mail and spam:

• Do not enable your client's junk mail filters. Gmail's spam filters also work in your IMAP client, and we recommend turning off any additional anti-spam or junk mail filters within your client. Your client's filter will attempt to download and classify all of your existing messages, which may slow down your client until the process is complete.

Note that the folder prefix [Gmail] is not used for all accounts. For a minority of users, the prefix [Google Mail] is used instead. This presumably applies to older accounts of users from the UK, Germany and Austria, where "Gmail" was initially rebranded to "Google Mail" following trademark disputes.