Labels

Creating a label

Labels are custom tags you define — each has a name and a colour. Create, rename, recolour, or hide them from Settings → Labels. There are 13 colours to choose from: green, teal, cyan, blue, indigo, violet, purple, pink, red, orange, amber, lime, and slate.

AI Emaily also ships 8 built-in “smart” labels you can use as-is or hide: VIP, Team, Important, Finance & Banking, Receipts & Invoice, Shipping & Delivery, Dev, and Marketing. Use them alongside your own or turn off the ones you don’t want.

1. 1

   Open Settings → Labels

   The label manager lists your custom labels and the 8 built-in smart labels, each with its colour swatch.

2. 2

   Create a new label and pick a colour

   Give it a name and choose one of the 13 colours (green, teal, cyan, blue, indigo, violet, purple, pink, red, orange, amber, lime, slate).

3. 3

   Save

   The label appears in the sidebar immediately, ready to apply by hand or to reference from an inbox rule’s “add label” action.

How labels get applied

There are three ways a label lands on a thread. First, manually: open a thread and toggle a label on from the reading-view toolbar or the right-hand context rail. A manual toggle always wins — it is your explicit decision and nothing overrides it.

Second, by a rule: an inbox rule’s “add label” action tags matching mail automatically on every sync. Add-label can stack with other actions in the same rule — mark-important, move, route-to-agent, and so on — so one rule can label, prioritise, and file a message in a single pass. See the Rules doc to set one up.

Third, through the built-in smart labels: “Receipts & Invoice” auto-applies when a message carries a money amount plus receipt or invoice context, and “Finance & Banking” auto-applies for known bank and payment sender domains. Both are on by default, and you can opt out of either from Settings → Labels.

1. 1

   Apply one manually

   Open the thread and toggle the label on from the reading-view toolbar or the right context rail. Manual toggles always win.

2. 2

   Auto-apply with a rule

   In Settings → Rules, add a rule whose action is “add label ‘Team’” (optionally stacked with mark-important or move). It tags matching mail on every sync.

3. 3

   Let the smart labels run

   Leave “Receipts & Invoice” and “Finance & Banking” on to have receipts and bank mail tagged automatically, or opt out in Settings → Labels.

Labels vs. AI tags

Labels and AI tags look similar but play opposite roles in a rule. A label is something you apply (by hand, by rule, or by a smart label) — it is an output. An AI tag is something the AI assigns by reading the message, and it is available as a rule condition — it is an input. Keep the two straight and rules become much easier to reason about.

Filtering by a label

Every label is a clickable shortcut in the sidebar with a live count next to it. Click a label to filter the view down to all threads that carry it, regardless of which folder or account they live in. The count updates as mail is labelled and read, so you can see at a glance which groups need attention.

Because a label is a filter and not a folder, applying one never moves the thread — a message in Primary tagged “Client” stays in Primary and simply also shows up when you click the “Client” shortcut.

Editing, hiding, and colours

Rename or recolour any label at any time from Settings → Labels — the change is reflected everywhere the label appears, including its sidebar shortcut. Rather than delete a label you’ve stopped using, you can hide it to take it out of the sidebar and pickers while keeping it defined; the same applies to any of the 8 built-in smart labels you don’t want.

Labels are app-internal to AI Emaily. They are not written back to Gmail’s own labels (or any other provider’s), so organising with labels never changes anything on the mail server.