Gmail - pimp your inbox to create personal knowledge database

Steve Rubel wrote an excellent post about taking your Gmail to an extraordinary new level -- using it as a searchable database by harnessing its rich filtering capabilities and imbuing it with tags. Rather than just using it as an email inbox, you can hit pay dirt if you stretch it to be your personal data mining system.

Here's how. First, forget about using the cumbersome label feature altogether. You will be using the filters and tags instead. As you will be sending yourself emails to seed your database, you will need to set up a filter so these emails are auto archived and marked as read and don't junk up your inbox.

When you find information you want to add to your database, you will email it to yourself (Rubel uses Ubiquity, a Firefox add on) with a special tag you add to the prefix. For example, youremail+mortgage crisis@gmail.com, if say you wanted to have access to a great article on the housing melt down. The email won't hit your inbox, but you can find it doing a search by its tag.

Then, to make your tags easy to find, use Gmail Quick Links, a Gmail Labs feature which bookmarks common Gmail views. This allows you to create a shortcut to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You need to enable this feature in your Gmail settings, found under the Labs tab.

If you live in your Gmail, this might be a great option for you to bookmark and search massive quantities of information all from the comfort of your home on the web, your inbox.

Tags: Gamil, Gmail Labs, Gmail Quick Links, Gmail search, Gmail tag database, GmailLabs, GmailQuickLinks, GmailSearch, GmailTagDatabase, news, Ubiquity