Use GMail as an online database with super fast search
I have to say that I really didn’t understand why Steve Rubel from over at MicroPersuasion was so crazy about GMail until I read his post on what you convert Google’s GMail into! I thought I was pretty slick using bookmarks, fancy RSS readers, and Google Notebook to keep track of all of the info I found interesting on the web, but alas there is a better way!
Of course if you’re trying to find something that you had saved earlier, it can be quite a pain if you have lots of bookmarks or lots of notes in Google Notebook. And the searching features in Google Notebook are not that great, along with the fact that you can’t get anything from Google Notebook to your mobile device.
So that’s where Google Toolbar and GMail come together to create a wonderful way to store anything from the web, view it anywhere, and find it quickly! In order to do this, there are a couple of more advanced features that you have to first setup in GMail: labels and filters.
Labels in GMail basically allow you to create “sub” email addresses for your GMail account. For example, let’s say I create a label called “Microsoft”, so what that means is that I know have an email address as the following: username+Microsoft@gmail.com, where user name is your GMail account name. This is a really great way to create email addresses that you can use to sign up for sites that you may end up getting spam from! Let’s say you need to sign up at a site because your company wants you to view a presentation or your friends want you to sign up on some new social networking site, well using labels you can create labels like “Work” or “MySpace” and then sign up to those sites with username+Work@gmail.com! Now it you want to view all messages from MySpace, simply click on the labels and all of those messages will appear.
This kinda sounds like folders almost, right? But what makes labels better than folder is that you can apply multiple labels to one email! So if you were using folders and you had a “Work” folder and a “Funny” folder, then what you would do if you got an email from a work buddy that was a joke! Well with labels you can apply funny and work to one email and it’ll show up on either of those when you click on the label!
But you may ask, how does that make any difference if it’s all coming to my Inbox anyway!? Well, that’s where filters come in! Filters bascially allow you to specify a condition whereby your email can be associated with a label, archived, etc. One of those conditions can be if it’s coming from an email address with your label attached to it. So if a mail is coming in from username+Myspace@gmail.com, you can have those emails automatically tagged with your label “MySpace”. And if you decide you hate MySpace, all you have to do is create a filter that tell GMail to delete any emails coming to that address!
Now getting back to how to use GMail as a database! What we want to do is create a GMail label that corresponds to how we want to store web pages. If you have Google Notebook broken down into sections, then this is a great way to create labels also. Maybe you want to create labels called “News”, “WorkStuff”, “Fun”, “Interesting”, etc. To create our label, log into your GMail account from the web browser so that you’re on the main Inbox page.
One the bottom, along side the left menu bar, you’ll see a box called “Labels“, which should have nothing in it if you’re haven’t done this already. Click on Edit Labels to get started creating a label.
On the right side, you’ll see the Settings options with the Labels tab opened. It’s pretty simple to create a label as you might be able to tell. Simply type in the name of label and click Create. You’ll now see your label in the list above (I created one called Programming since I usually want to clip certain articles relating to that topic from web sites):
Now in order to setup our filter to catch the emails with that label and Archive them, we’ll need to create a filter. We want to archive the emails so that they don’t show up in our Inbox and clutter everything up. Click on Filters, which is right next to Labels.
On the Filters tab, click Create a New Filter at the bottom of the orange box:
In the Filter options box, you want to type into the TO address field the following: username+label@gmail.com. For example, I created a Programming label, so I’ll type in Aseem1234+Programming@gmail.com (it’s not case sensitive) and click Next.
Now we can choose the filter action that we want performed. Check the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” option and select “Apply the label” and choose the label we just created:
Click Create Filter and we’re done with the first part! Once you get the hang of it, it’ll only take a few minutes to create a new filter if you need it! Now we need to send our pages to Google for storage! So how do we do that? We use the new Google Toolbar! Make sure you have the latest edition of the toolbar otherwise you may not have all of the options.
Once installed, you’ll see at the far right an option called “Send to”:
Click on that and choose “GMail”. An IE window will automatically open that will take either all of the content from the page or whatever content you manually selected and attach it to an email that you can now send to your new address, which is for me was Aseem1234+programming@gmail.com
Click Send and your GMail account will recogize it with the label and will automatically archive it for future searching! And that’s it, you can now use GMail to store all your web pages! And it really stores everything on a web page if you don’t manually select anything, so it can take up a good amount of space eventually! But right now Google is giving 2.5GB of space and probably will have to follow Yahoo soon with unlimited storage also!
Now if you want to search all that vast data that you’ve stored, simply log into your GMail account, and in the search box at the top, type in the word “label” followed by a colon and the name of your label. For example, “label:programming” and then after that type in a keyword(s) that you want to search on. So if I’m looking for something on Foxpro in my programming label, I would type “label:programming Foxpro”:
Enjoy it!
Of course if you’re trying to find something that you had saved earlier, it can be quite a pain if you have lots of bookmarks or lots of notes in Google Notebook. And the searching features in Google Notebook are not that great, along with the fact that you can’t get anything from Google Notebook to your mobile device.
So that’s where Google Toolbar and GMail come together to create a wonderful way to store anything from the web, view it anywhere, and find it quickly! In order to do this, there are a couple of more advanced features that you have to first setup in GMail: labels and filters.
Labels in GMail basically allow you to create “sub” email addresses for your GMail account. For example, let’s say I create a label called “Microsoft”, so what that means is that I know have an email address as the following: username+Microsoft@gmail.com, where user name is your GMail account name. This is a really great way to create email addresses that you can use to sign up for sites that you may end up getting spam from! Let’s say you need to sign up at a site because your company wants you to view a presentation or your friends want you to sign up on some new social networking site, well using labels you can create labels like “Work” or “MySpace” and then sign up to those sites with username+Work@gmail.com! Now it you want to view all messages from MySpace, simply click on the labels and all of those messages will appear.
This kinda sounds like folders almost, right? But what makes labels better than folder is that you can apply multiple labels to one email! So if you were using folders and you had a “Work” folder and a “Funny” folder, then what you would do if you got an email from a work buddy that was a joke! Well with labels you can apply funny and work to one email and it’ll show up on either of those when you click on the label!
But you may ask, how does that make any difference if it’s all coming to my Inbox anyway!? Well, that’s where filters come in! Filters bascially allow you to specify a condition whereby your email can be associated with a label, archived, etc. One of those conditions can be if it’s coming from an email address with your label attached to it. So if a mail is coming in from username+Myspace@gmail.com, you can have those emails automatically tagged with your label “MySpace”. And if you decide you hate MySpace, all you have to do is create a filter that tell GMail to delete any emails coming to that address!
Now getting back to how to use GMail as a database! What we want to do is create a GMail label that corresponds to how we want to store web pages. If you have Google Notebook broken down into sections, then this is a great way to create labels also. Maybe you want to create labels called “News”, “WorkStuff”, “Fun”, “Interesting”, etc. To create our label, log into your GMail account from the web browser so that you’re on the main Inbox page.
One the bottom, along side the left menu bar, you’ll see a box called “Labels“, which should have nothing in it if you’re haven’t done this already. Click on Edit Labels to get started creating a label.
On the Filters tab, click Create a New Filter at the bottom of the orange box:
In the Filter options box, you want to type into the TO address field the following: username+label@gmail.com. For example, I created a Programming label, so I’ll type in Aseem1234+Programming@gmail.com (it’s not case sensitive) and click Next.
Click Create Filter and we’re done with the first part! Once you get the hang of it, it’ll only take a few minutes to create a new filter if you need it! Now we need to send our pages to Google for storage! So how do we do that? We use the new Google Toolbar! Make sure you have the latest edition of the toolbar otherwise you may not have all of the options.
Once installed, you’ll see at the far right an option called “Send to”:
Click on that and choose “GMail”. An IE window will automatically open that will take either all of the content from the page or whatever content you manually selected and attach it to an email that you can now send to your new address, which is for me was Aseem1234+programming@gmail.com
Click Send and your GMail account will recogize it with the label and will automatically archive it for future searching! And that’s it, you can now use GMail to store all your web pages! And it really stores everything on a web page if you don’t manually select anything, so it can take up a good amount of space eventually! But right now Google is giving 2.5GB of space and probably will have to follow Yahoo soon with unlimited storage also!
Now if you want to search all that vast data that you’ve stored, simply log into your GMail account, and in the search box at the top, type in the word “label” followed by a colon and the name of your label. For example, “label:programming” and then after that type in a keyword(s) that you want to search on. So if I’m looking for something on Foxpro in my programming label, I would type “label:programming Foxpro”:
Joee
No one is too busy, it's just a matter of priority.