Labels

I am an email pack rat. Usually I just leave them in my inbox. I hate deleting them because I have found that more often than not, I need to reference an email. Sometimes even up to a few years after I received it.

Gmail has a bunch of handy features, my favourite being labels. Instead of creating folders to file away your emails, you just apply a label to it and then a single click will archive it. So anytime you need to find something, you just click on a label and it will pull up all the emails you've tagged. With Gmail labels, they exist as links on the left hand menu of your webmail view. I never thought twice about them until I started dating Simon.

He had this wicked habit of looking over my shoulder whenever I would check my Gmail, to see what had come into my inbox since the last time he snooped. He would ask a million insane questions and we would get into horrible fights. I started making sure to quickly slap a label on any new emails and then immediately archive, thus getting messages out of my inbox.

Then Simon noticed my label menu. Of course, that lead to him asking what the labels are for and to see the emails associated with each label. So I found a feature that could hide those too. So when he would look over my shoulder he saw nothing, no labels on the menu and nothing in my inbox.

We got into many screaming matches about my Gmail. He was convinced that I was hiding things from him since my inbox was always cleaned out and he couldn't see the labels anymore. He wanted full access to my email accounts. I was, and always will be adament about the fact that just because I was married to him, it didn't mean I had to give up my privacy.

It's taken me until now to bring back the label links on the side menu. The reason being that I was waiting for a package from Linens'N'Things. The tracking info was in an email which I had labelled and archived. It was getting annoying having to type the label into the search function every time I wanted to track my package. On the 28th time doing this, I remembered that I could just have my labels showing.

So I've turned them back on. And for the last week or so, I freak out when I log into my Gmail. I keep thinking that any moment, Simon will come around the corner, see my labels and start screaming at me.

I still have a long way to go to shake off the shackles of panic.