I just realised it was my two year Gmail account anniver­sary on Fri­day. I’m cur­rently sit­ting at 688MB or 25%, which is a lot if you con­sider that there’s very few attach­ments in there! Tag­ging my mes­sages has totally changed the way I approach mail and I gotta say I totally love it.

One of the great things about Gmail is that I keep dis­cov­er­ing new tips and tech­niques. The lat­est is the cus­tom search “label:unread | label:inbox | label:starred”. This shows me every­thing that’s cur­rently in my inbox, unread OR starred — basi­cally, every­thing that needs my atten­tion. If I have too many starred items wait­ing for me to deal with, I some­times drop the starred label and just use “label:unread | label:inbox”.

This has another advan­tage over just using “label:unread” to see all unread mes­sages. When you use that label, archiv­ing or assign­ing a label to a mes­sage being viewed will send you straight back to the unread mes­sage list­ing with that mes­sage no longer show­ing (as it’s no longer unread), so if you want to apply a label AND archive a mes­sage you can’t do it from that screen. When you use a cus­tom search, how­ever, you can apply label or mul­ti­ple labels or archive the mes­sage and you don’t auto­mat­i­cally get redi­rected after that hap­pens. Much more usable.

One prob­lem with this oth­er­wise very clever trick was there’s no way to save cus­tom searches and no way to book­mark that par­tic­u­lar search, so any­time I wanted to use it I had to type it into the search bar. I fig­ured that some clever cookie would prob­a­bly have writ­ten a Grease­mon­key script to save cus­tom searches as but­tons or some­thing, but it was only today that I actu­ally went out and looked for one. Low and behold, a Google search for “gmail saved search” turned up a Grease­mon­key script doing exactly what I want as the first result. Thanks again Google!