Monday evening, Gmail announced the latest evolution of their Gmail labeling system: color coding. The prior labeling system was just a black font with whatever label you came up with. The problem was that since the label went right next to the subject, it got lost when scanning through the inbox.

I’ve craved something to help organize the crush of emails—personal, professional, list-serve, automated calendar reminders (courtesy of Google Calendar), etc.—that flood my inbox. Help has arrived in the form two types of labels: colored text and colored boxes. To the hyper-organized, Google has taken the weakest Gmail feature and converted it into its best! I’ll be using the the Red-Yellow-Green method, with red being time-sensitive and green being “get-to-later” with a mix of various one-word labels. Dave Cohen, Google software engineer, has a much more exotic approach:

I get so much mail from my lists, I filter and archive most of it right away but I add labels just in case I need to find it again later. Those labels are my chameleons draped in subtle tones of green and blue. They’re there doing their job, but I barely notice them. Every once in a while I get mail that’s really important. These emails get my monarch butterfly labels, sporting bright red and yellow.

Dave Cohen summed up why this is now the most important Gmail feature: “Thanks to colored labels, it’s easy to scan my inbox and immediately find all the emails that are really important to me.”

No doubt the increasingly dominant Internet impulse.