If a CS graduate can't figure out some simple gmail labels and filters then they should not be awarded that degree. Plain and simple. It's not rocket science.

And there are no other students at any college other than CS students? I'm not sure why a biologist or a literature student would need to be au fait with Google's admittedly fairly unfriendly email management setup.

Digital literacy is important to every field. Email filters are not some arcane computer science concept, they are the modern equivalent of filing physical mail into the right folder/pidgeon hole/inbox/whatever.

Biology is a great example because of just how important digital record management is to experimentation in the field.

I don't think you've seen many biology field data sets.

All biology folks I'm interacting with are juggling excel sheets all day.

Many relative to the total set, no. But enough to know writing it down isn’t going to cut it. Most datasets I’ve seen are xls, hdfs or csvs nested many directories deep. Not exactly for those who can’t manage an email filter. Without getting into the processing of it either

You can store Perl in any file format.

1. This was a response to a CS professor, so specific to CS students.

2. Yes, configuring gmail filters should be doable for anybody with a university degree. It's really not hard.

I partially solve this by using Thunderbird on my laptop. When I get emails on my smartphone (on the Gmail app), they unfortunately all go to the inbox. But the moment I open Thunderbird, it nicely organizes them for me.

I use Thunderbird on both the desktop and Android. Love it.

Perhaps Outlook is difficult to configure. Thunderbird is intuitive.

Yes, every now and then I think I should try it on Android as well, but still have to do it. It would be great if there was the possibility to sync filters across devices, in a similar way of using your Firefox account to sync extensions. Do you know if this is possible?

I don't think it's possible.

Does Thunderbird have rules? I searched for this and didn't find them.

Yes, it has filters. Open it's menu (the three stacked lines on the desktop version) and you will find them there.

> It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers.

While true, unless I'm mistaken, markers (I assume you're referring to tags) can be nested to provide a pseudo-folder hierarchy, and with proper filters you can remove the "inbox" tag and have the mail only show up under the specific tag.

TBH I don't fully mind it, it lets you classify an email in multiple ways (eg "See Later" as well as "Work related").

Tags are great but I still want my folders. Also doesn't help that the way google describes some things is unnecessarily complex or confusing. For example, removing an email from the inbox requires archiving it. In most other applications (WhatsApp, Signal, Outlook, etc) archiving usually results in the email being placed in a specific archive folder that isn't readily accessible through the UI. At least not to the same level that normal emails are.

People in my work and personal life experience do not understand the concept of labels in a Google inbox and misname them folders 100% of the time. Google allows you to drag-n-drop emails "into" labels like you would files in folders conflating the issue even more as the logic to automate this behaviour with a filter isn't leveraged. Even the layout of a default inbox is setup in a way that the average user has difficulty understanding what happens when an email drops off the "front page" of their inbox.

They can be nested, the one thing I have never been able to figure out though is how to get alerts of receiving a message while also filing away in a sub folder. You get one or the other in outlook, as a result I rarely check my work email anymore cause I either get the fire hose of spam or miss everything entirety because it's going to a folder and not passing along an alert about a new message.

Gmail still has perfectly functional filters that can be set to auto-apply a label and skip the inbox. They may be called "labels" now, but they still function just as they did when the UI called them "folders"