You may receive tons of email in your Gmail account on a day to day basis from social networking sites, from your friends, from colleagues and more, adding labels to your emails will definitely help you to distinguish the emails quickly and let you view all emails from a particular source at once.

The labels in Gmail are pretty similar to physical folders available in Yahoo and Hotmail, however with Gmail, only a single copy maintained, no matter how many labels you apply to it.

Also Read: How To Auto Archive Emails in Gmail

How To Automatically Add Labels To Emails in Gmail

Step 1: You can either search for emails that you want to create a label for or apply a label to emails directly using the Filter messages like these functionality in Gmail.

To apply labels by using search, click on the create a filter link on the top of the page and enter the appropriate search criteria for filtering emails..

If you want to apply labels from within the emails, in the email message click on the arrow next to the reply button and select Filter messages like these options from it.

Clicking this option will directly take you to the search options for creating the filter and enter the from email address into the input box. From here on both these processes follow the same steps.

Step 2: Once you have filled in the search criteria, using the above step, click on the Next step button, in the new options that are displayed, you can create a new label or choose a existing one by using the drop down next to Apply the Label option.

Step 3: To automatically start applying labels to new emails, click on the create filter button, you can also apply the same label to existing emails by selecting the checkbox next to “Also apply filter to xx conversations below.”, where xx may be different for each criteria.

That’s it, any new emails matching the filter criteria, will be automatically labeled in the future, you can create a unlimited number of labels in Gmail, if you are worried about losing your filters or want to create the same filters in another Gmail account, checkout how you can import and export Gmail filters.

Want to find more such interesting tips on Gmail, check out the Gmail Tips section for handy tips and tricks, tutorials and tools for Gmail.