A must-try Android email upgrade – Computerworld

But what about when you randomly run into a conversation you want to monitor that doesn’t meet those conditions — say, a specific email thread with a potential business partner or realtor (or even a koala realtor who happens to be a potential business partner) that you really want to watch for replies around right now?

With the system we’ve created, adding any such email on the fly into your alert system is easy.

The way you’ll do it varies slightly depending on whether you’re sending the email from a desktop computer or from Android.

From a computer:

• Start a new email like you always do in Gmail.
• Click the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right area of the compose box. (You can do this before or after you’ve written the email. It doesn’t matter!)
• Hover over “Label” in the menu that comes up, then find and click the “Notify” label we made a little while ago.

That’s all: You can now just send your email normally, and it’ll have the “Notify” label applied from the get-go — meaning any new replies coming into it will trigger your Gmail Android alert and create a notification on your phone.

If you want to add an existing email thread into your notification mechanism, meanwhile, you’ll just click the label-shaped icon above it (or click the three-dot menu icon above it, if you don’t see a label icon, and select “Label as” from the menu that pops up) — or use the L keyboard shortcut, provided you’ve got Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts activated — and select our spiffy new “Notify” label.

From Android:

The Gmail Android app doesn’t make it quite as simple to add a label onto a new email on the fly, while you’re actually writing it. So in that scenario, when you want to have any replies to a specific email thread notify you, you’ll need to first send the email and then head into your Gmail Sent folder (located within the app’s three-line main menu) to add the label onto it right after.

Just open the email from there, then tap the three-dot menu icon above it and select “Change labels.” Find and select “Notify,” and boom: You’re good to go.

With any email you’ve received or you’re replying to, it’s even easier: Tap that same three-dot icon in the upper-right corner while viewing the email, then select “Change labels” and tap “Notify.”

And with that, give yourself a well-earned pat on the back. You, my koala-obsessed companion, just gave your Android email a magnificent upgrade. You won’t be bothered by needless notifications ever again, and you’ll always know when something important hits your inbox.

That’s an enlightened way to handle email notifications on Android. That, you might even say, is what one could call Android intelligence.

Treat yourself to even more advanced Android notification wizardry with my Android notification power-pack — a free gift when you sign up for my weekly Android Intelligence newsletter!