Using GMail Superstars

Gmail, is really amazing due to all it's features, yeah the new Google Buzz! is a bit annoying but you can get it totally disabled. To begin with let me tell you something about Gmail Superstars which is a label in itself and can also be categorized as folder if required, here in short is what Superstars is all about.

Some of the many features added by Google in their Gmail Labs, is superstars instead of using a single star to flag all the messages, you can choose between 12 icons. After enabling Superstars in Gmail Labs and by clicking on "Save changes", then you go to the settings and select the icons you want to use. The exclamation mark is useful to flag important messages, quotes could show that a message needs a reply, while the info icon could be used for messages that contain valuable information. To star messages faster, you can enable keyboard shortcuts in the settings. "The superstars will rotate when you press the 's' keyboard shortcut or when you click successively," explains Google. "Rotating through the superstars only works when you click (or hit 's') successively. If you pause for a second, then the next click will turn off the superstar. It's designed this way so that if you never click successively, then you'll just get the original on/off toggle behavior."

If you want to find the messages that have a certain kind of star, use one of the following queries, simply type the following as shown below:-has:
yellow-star
has:blue-star
has:red-star
has:orange-star
has:green-star
has:purple-star
has:red-bang
has:yellow-bang
has:blue-info
has:orange-guillemet
has:green-check
has:purple-question

Also do enable the Quick Links labs feature to save some of these queries so that they are always accessible with a single click. Just search for has:blue-star or any other value and click on "Add Quick Link".

That is all for this post. I also have another add-on to this article which tells you more about using GMail Search, I have published it on Gigjets.