ItsGeekToMe.co

“Life is filled with unanswered questions, but it is the courage to seek those answers that continues to give meaning to life. You can spend your life wallowing in despair, wondering why you were the one who was led towards the road strewn with pain, or you can be grateful that you are strong enough to survive it.”

                                     – J.D. Stroube, from his book Caged by Damnation

 In case you hadn’t noticed, I have the happy privilege of answering another reader question this week!  That is a cause for minor celebration.  Enjoy.

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 Q: I recently signed up to receive Kim Komando’s daily email. Fun to read, good information. Coming to you, rather than her, to get another perspective. I get her mails via Gmail. Odd thing is that it shows up in Inbox with a label Komando in a grayed box at the start of the Subject line. Early in the process, I have deleted one of those emails and they also disappeared from the other folder/label. I’m leery about removing an email I’d like to keep, afraid that it will disappear entirely. I’m sure I didn’t connect Inbox, Promotions or Komando in Gmail, so I can’t understand why that would happen. Doesn’t happen with other Gmails.

 – Morris F.
Navarre, Florida

A:  Well, you place me in the midst of quite lofty company, Morris!  Kim Komando is one of the giants of tech Q&A, with two daily and one weekend radio show.  She also authors various written media, such as her Daily Tech Update, plus newsletters, e-books, and even a syndicated USA Today column.  She calls herself America’s Digital Goddess® and is easily one of the most successful radio talk show hosts around.  With competition like her, it seems pretty obvious why our local newspapers – which are in the same publishing family as USA Today – chose to cease carrying my column.  Kim is building a digital empire, while I’ve been reduced to begging for questions each week. Oh well.  I bet my Christmas lights are way better than hers.  But I digress.

Morris, this is one of those occasions where I wish you had included a screenshot of your issue.  While “it shows up in Inbox with a label Komando in a grayed box at the start of the Subject line” is a pretty comprehensive description, Gmail supports so many different features, from labels, to automatic filters, to a variety of tags, that it’s difficult for me to put my finger on exactly which one you’re experiencing.

One possibility is that you have a filter in your Gmail that automatically applies a tag with the name “Komando” to incoming emails from her newsletter.  This has the net effect of placing them into a single folder-like group, which in the process, marks them with the name of their tag.  If there is indeed a tag named “Komando” those emails would appear very much like you described, with the tag leading the Subject line.  I wouldn’t exactly describe it as “grayed” as you did, which implies to me something that is disabled or unavailable in context.  But Gmail tags do appear in a gray box to set them off from the rest of the Subject line.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Gmail does not have folders in the traditional sense.  I know it may appear that it does, but trust me when I say that appearance is a side-effect of Gmail’s use of tags.  In this case, an email tagged “Komando” is not copied of moved into a separate “Komando” folder.  Instead, it exists as a conversation thread in your account’s “All Mail” and has the “Komando” tag applied, along with an “Inbox” tag when it first arrives.  One of the neat things about Gmail is that each email can have multiple tags which allow emails to persist in multiple conversations simultaneously.  If these were indeed folders, the email would magically appear in multiple folders all at once.

When you clicked “Delete” on one of the emails while viewing it, you weren’t just removing the tag.  Rather, you were deleting that conversation thread, which is why it disappeared from your inbox.  Assuming your Gmail’s Trash has not been emptied, you’ll likely find it sitting in there.  You can easily move it back to the Inbox if you like, as well as re-applying the Komando label.

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