A GMail-based personal filing system

I come across a lot of useful & interesting information while browsing the web. Creating bookmarks of all these websites isn’t really practical… but with the following system I can harness the power of GMail to create an easy-to-use, convenient filing system.

First of all you need a GMail account. You can e-mail me at cegranier AT hotmail DOT com, with “GMAIL” in the subject, and I’ll send you an invitation to open a GMail account (if I still have any available).

Then you need the GmailIt bookmarklet, which -once installed- allows you to simply click on it to create a GMail message containing the information of the website you’re currently browsing (fills in the subject with your current page’s title and the body with the URL and your current selection).

Finally, in GMail, go to the Contacts section and edit (or create) your own contact information and change the name to “QQ”. Then create a new filter that will act on any message sent to “QQ”. The way I have it set up is as follows:

When a message arrives sent to “QQ” it automatically assigns the label “interesting” to the message. This way, whenever I come across a website with interesting information I simply click on the GMailIt bookmarklet and up pops a GMail message compose window with all the necessary information filled in. I simply address the message to “QQ” - which GMail smartly interprets as myself - and send it. Once it arrives at my GMail inbox, GMail automatically assigns it to the “interesting” category. If I want, I can add some additional information to the message body before sending it. Voilá! Instant filing.

You can get as creative as you want… for example you may:

1. Add labels to the beginning of each message’s subject before sending it to categorize them even further. (WEB, TECH, POL, SCI, etc…)

2. Create additional contacts with your email address (QQ, WW, or even WEB, TECH, etc…) to allow you to create further filters for each address. Send gadget info to QQ, political stuff to WW, etc.