While doing a recent cleanup and consolidation of my Gmail labels and filters I noticed an issue that's good to be aware of when managing your lists. I wanted to reduce my number of labels so that they are all viewable when I am on smaller monitors such as my laptop screen. For example I consolidated all of my Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube style sites into a single Social Networking label. If you delete a label before you update your filters it's a lot harder to go back and cleanup your filters since the filters start losing parts of the filtering rules as you are deleting the labels.
The common sense order for doing a label and filter cleanup is :
- Create all new labels that you need
- Update all filters so that labels you plan to delete are no longer used
- Delete all unused labels after your filters have been updated
It is safe to rename a label at any time. Go to your Gmail settings and click the labels tab. Double click on a label to update the name. Any filters referencing that label will be automatically updated to use the new label name.