What are Labels in Email? Gmail Labels vs Folders Explained

Definition

💡 Labels in email: Tags you apply to messages to organize and categorize them. Think of them like sticky notes on physical files. One email can have multiple labels, and it'll appear under each one.

What labels do

To organize your emails into categories like "Work," "Family," or "To-Do," you can create labels.

But here's what makes labels different from folders: One email can have five different labels at once, and it'll show up under each of those labels simultaneously without creating duplicates. That client invoice can be tagged "Client A," "Invoices," "January," and "Paid" all at once. Click any of those labels, you'll see the same email listed there.

Labels are different from folders. Only you can access your labels, and the people you email don't get them. They're completely private. When you send an email, none of your labels are sent with it. The recipient has no idea how you've categorized their message.

Gmail labels, for example, do not change the location of emails; they remain in the inbox or their original location but can be viewed under different labels, enhancing visibility and categorization. You're not moving emails around. You're tagging them.

Labels vs folders

The difference comes down to how many categories one email can belong to.

Folders work like physical filing cabinets. When you add an email to a folder, it is like stashing away a paper file inside a drawer, and just like how a file can exist only inside a particular drawer at any given point in time, an email can be stored only in one folder. Move it somewhere else? It disappears from the original folder. You can't have it in two places at once unless you create duplicates.

Labels work like tags. Think of a label as a Post-it note tacked on to a paper file. Gmail allows you to add as many labels as you want to an email without needing to make a copy of the email. That means one message can belong to multiple categories simultaneously.

This multi-tagging capability is Gmail's killer feature, meaning you can organize emails by project, client, status, and date without the rigid hierarchies that folders force on you.

Other email clients like Outlook use folders. Gmail uses labels. If you access your Gmail account through Outlook, Apple Mail, or any other email program, labels appear as folders—Gmail's IMAP implementation maps each label to a folder in your desktop client.

How to use labels in Gmail

You can create up to 5,000 labels. Here's the basic workflow:

Creating a label: Scroll down to the bottom of the label list located on the left-hand side of your Gmail window, click on 'More,' then scroll further and click on 'Create new label.' Hiver Name it whatever you want. You can also nest labels under parent labels to create sub-categories, like folders within folders.

Adding labels to emails: Check the box next to the email you want to label, then at the top, click Labels and select the label you want to apply. You can apply multiple labels to the same email.

Using labels like folders: When you use the Move to tool, it assigns the label you selected to that conversation and removes all other labels. This mimics traditional folder behavior. The email only appears under that one label, just like it would in a single folder. If you prefer that approach, use "Move to" instead of "Labels."

Archiving with labels: When you hit "Archive" in Gmail, you're not moving the email to an "Archive folder"—Archive simply removes the Inbox label. The email stays in All Mail and keeps any other labels you've applied. It just vanishes from your inbox view.

Labels in other email clients

Gmail popularized labels, but not every email client uses them.

Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird: These use traditional folders. You drag an email to a folder, it lives in that folder. One location per email.

Spark: Spark adapts to the native organization system of your email provider. It supports Gmail labels (including multi-labeling) and Outlook folders, presenting them in a way that feels natural to that service while allowing you to manage them from a single, unified interface. Spark adapts to whatever your email service uses natively.

Some email clients call labels "tags" or "categories," but the concept is the same. Multiple tags per email, all pointing to the same message.

Top tips for getting the most from labels

Create a label structure upfront. Take a moment to scroll through your inbox and write out general correspondence categories—this will allow you to set your inbox up to sort and filter correspondence to save you time. Common labels: Projects, Clients, Priority, Waiting on Reply, Reference.

Use color-coding. Color-coding your labels will help you quickly ascertain their priority and identify incoming emails by type—for example, all emails from your boss or CEO might have the "VIP" label in red.

Nest labels for hierarchy. Nesting of labels can be compared to creating folders and sub-folders to organize your emails. You can have a "Clients" parent label with sub-labels for each client name underneath.

Automate with filters. This kind of automation makes Gmail's label system far more efficient than manually dragging emails into folders—you set it up once, and your inbox organizes itself. Create filters to auto-apply labels based on sender, subject, keywords, or other criteria.

Don't over-label. Gmail labels improve searchability by allowing users to find emails through search queries and filters based on the applied labels. But if every email has 10 labels, you've defeated the purpose. Be selective.

Review and clean up. When you delete an email, it's removed from every label and your inbox. Periodically delete old labels you're not using anymore to keep your system clean.

Related terms

The Readdle Team

Labels in email

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