Randall F. Dean shows how to add searchable keywords to Gmail subject lines by forwarding a message to yourself, clicking the caret, selecting Edit Subject, and typing custom tags like Project A or Client B. Combined with labels and filters, this makes emails easier to find later.
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Hi everybody, time for another microlearning video. A week or so ago, I actually did a video for Outlook users on how they can change the subject lines of the emails they've received so that they can put in code words or keywords to find those same emails using Search Later. Figured it would only be fair if I did the same thing for people using Gmail, although it is a slightly different process. So let's go in and take a look. So what I have here is this email from me to me, but now let me show you what I would recommend you do here. I didn't see an easy way to change the subject line in the actual email itself. So what I think might be actually easier is to just simply forward the email to myself. And then when it brings up the forward screen though, what you have to do is you have to come down here And what you want to do is click this little drop arrow. Now that caret is not easy to see, but if you click on that little caret right here at the top, you can come here and hit Edit Subject. And so what that does is now what you could do is you could come in here and put in, you know, Project A, you know, Client B, Coworker C. And so now that you've done that, now you can forward this, although you might want to also do this, just get rid of your standard auto signature that comes in so that when you go to find it, you're basically starting right off with the actual message that you're looking for. And then I would say, as long as it doesn't have attachments, you might be able to just archive or delete the previous email. And this way, when you're going to do search, you're going to have those code words or keywords right there in the subject line. You couple that with having a good set of labels and also maybe knowing how to use your filters and search, you should be able to find your stuff, which means you should be able to put your stuff away. So hopefully you found this one useful. By the way, that same little tip, let's, let's, you know, where I clicked on the little caret to be able to edit the subject line, that is also a really good habit if you've been trading emails back and forth with somebody and all of a sudden the topic of the conversation is fully changed, and/or if you're going to forward it on to somebody else and you want to put a slight change in the subject line too. So that change of subject line, uh, little tip can be useful in several ways. All right, I hope you found this useful. Uh, if you're a Gmail user, I'd like to say thank you for your time. Um, hey, let's get this on full screen mode. Uh, thanks for your time. And if you'd like to find out more about me and my programs, including some of my my online streaming options, go check out my website, randalldean.com. Of course, if you like these videos, please give it a like, please subscribe to the channel, maybe add a comment. And if you'd like to get my series of productivity PDF tip sheets, including a new, uh, newly revised YouTube channel guide, basically giving you access to a lot of my better videos and categories, just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in the subject line. Thanks everybody.
