

Ask HN: Do you use stars to mark messages in Gmail? - hundsim

However seemingly useful, I find myself never using the star functionality in Gmail. And asking around (friends and colleagues), I have yet to find someone that regularly use it and find it indispensable. 
I&#x27;m curious to find out how common this is.
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B5geek
I have used it, but it is too limited. If they had made it a variable scale
(i.e. 0-5 stars) that would have made it vastly more practical and functional.

The way that it is presented as a "remember this item" or "note this for later
reference", is completely redundant when you consider that everything you
archive is "save this for later".

So to actually answer your question: No. I tried and gave up.

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mindcrime
Yes, all the time. I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists and noisy "stuff", so
I use stars heavily to flag threads that are important, so they don't drown in
the noise. If I need to revisit a thread that is more than a day or two old,
and I know it's important (and therefore should have been starred) I just go
straight to the "starred" view. Only if it isn't near the top and easy to find
to I fall back to keyword search.

I've also started using labels more lately as well, and find that pretty
handy. Anything sales related, for example, gets a special label. This is
especially handy for unsolicited inbound leads.

