It always amuses me when I read yet another online rant about Gmail abandoning the folder structure in their email application, in favour of labels. Whenever Gmail asks their users what features they would like to see, one of them is always "give us folders!". But answer me this - what precisely is the difference between a folder and a label? Answer : absolutely nothing at all.

A folder is basically a place-holder for you to find something again when you need it. A label performs the same function. By labelling something in Gmail, you are assigning it to a certain area of your email app and if you need the email again, you will just click on the label name and up pops the email in question. A folder does exactly the same thing.

So to all the anti-Gmail whiners that ridicule Google's decision to employ labels instead of folders, why don't you tell me precisely how a folder differs from a label?

I bet you can't.

I have been spending the last few days reading the excellent book "Lifehacker - 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day" and it has a big email section. One of the things the book advocates is an empty inbox and immediately assigning each incoming email to a certain label or action. Unimportant low priority mails get archived with a label to be read later while highly important emails immediately arrive in the inbox to be dealt with.

It's reading this book that has given me so much insight and appreciation to the labelling and filtering system that Gmail offers. Thanks to the new filters that I put in place yesterday, I haven't been interrupted by a single email all afternoon today. This has allowed me to get some tasks finished which have been sitting around idle for days and even weeks. Absolute bliss.