Did this a few months ago -- one of the best decisions I've ever made!

Once you do this, you just can't go back... I mean, you know the saying, "Once you go black/mouseless, you'll never go back"

TheFalconer

j/k - is that coming from Vi keyboard commands? I don't know if I can use it if it's coming from Vi... ;)

urukhaifive

1, Urukhaifive: No, j/k comes from rogue/hack/nethack not vi. :)

2, If you enable the Google Labs, there's another thing you can do: Go to label. Just type 'gl' and any label (eg glspam). When you can do that, there's almost nothing you can't do (except delete all spam or select all (not just current screenful) messages).

mlvezie

Another useful Gmail shortcut key is # for delete. I'm not really surprised they left it out tho, since Google doesn't actually want us deleting messages from Gmail.

Saibot

Hmmm. I have to disagree with one of her points: In step 2, she just Archives anything she doesn't want to read without first labeling it. Does anyone else find this potentially counter-productive?

OK, I am ABSOLUTELY NOT a very organized person, but one thing that I regularly and consistently do is to assign a Label to ANYTHING that every gets Archived. Yes, I can always use Search to find things, but remember that all Archiving does is remove the "Inbox" Label making the message only viewable using the All Mail view or Search. With almost 8000 emails, using the All Mail view to find something is simply not an option for me. I do heavily depend on Searching, but I also use Labels to get a "categorized" picture of groups of related emails.

The obvious question then is can you assign a Label from the keyboard only? I don't think so.

jbarr

My personal favorite shortcut is [. It archives and sends you to the next message.

bzoomer16

Nice tipp with TAB+ENTER but what about adding labels to a mail ?

PrimaveraDeepak

Echoing jbarr, please tell us how to apply labels to messages without using the mouse!

This is one reason I tag in Thunderbird: Using Gmail's IMAP interface and a Thunderbird add-on called Nostalgy, I can select messages and move/copy them to IMAP folders (which correspond to Gmail labels) all without the mouse.

Posco Grubb

Yes, you can label with just the keyboard:

1. Hit the period key which will open up the "More Actions" dropdown

2. Type the first letter of the label you want to apply which will highlight the label. If more than one label starts with the same letter, typing the letter repeatedly will will cycle through the labels that begin with that letter

3. Press enter to apply the label

4. Archive that sucker!

(I have not been able to get this to work properly in Safari, but it works in FireFox and *cough* Internet Explorer)

I like to label my working projects with a numbered prefix ( i.e. 1_Try_To_Rule_The_World) so I can quickly add labels to the appropriate emails and archive them by pressing . Once the project is completed, I just rename the label so that my number is now free for the next project that comes down the pipeline.

tobybooth

The following site has several commands (including delete) directly from Google:

[mail.google.com]

JeRrYFaR

@TonyAgudo: P.S. - The "from" setting should be "Tony Agudo <antoniusmisfit@gmail.com>" (Forgot to use HTML character encoding to properly show less/greater than symbols).

TonyAgudo

I read my Gmail sans mouse, but quite a bit differently: I use Mutt, the *nix terminal email client to access my Gmail via IMAP. Just set your ~/.muttrc file to something like this:

set mbox_type=Maildir
set folder=~/Mail

#IMAP Settings: Replace with your name and email address
set realname="Tony Agudo"
set from="Tony Agudo "
set imap_user=antoniusmisfit@gmail.com
set folder=imaps://imap.gmail.com
set spoolfile=imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX
set record=imaps://imap.gmail.com/Sent
set postponed=imaps://imap.gmail.com/Drafts
mailboxes =INBOX
set header_cache=~/.mutt-cache

#Reading mail
set timeout=10
set mail_check=5
set sort=threads
set sort_aux=date
set move=no
set mark_old=no

#Sending mail: Again replace with your own email here
set smtp_url="smtps://antoniusmisfit@gmail.com@smtp.gmail.com/"

The only downside to this is that when you delete emails, it goes to the "All Mail" folder instead of Trash, which forces me to occasionally go to the website to manually move them there.

TonyAgudo

@tobybooth: Thank you!

Posco Grubb