---
title: "Organizing your mail"
description: "Labels, rules that file mail for you, and pinning the conversations you keep coming back to."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.doota.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Organizing your mail

Doota keeps your inbox as one running list, and gives you a few quiet tools to
shape it: **labels** to group conversations, **rules** to file mail
automatically, and **pins** to keep something important at the top.

## Labels

Labels are your own tags — *travel*, *invoices*, *family* — for grouping related
conversations. A conversation can carry as many as you like, and labelling
doesn't remove it from your inbox; it just adds a tag you can filter by later.

Labels live in **your** mailbox. On a shared inbox, the labels you add are yours
to organize with — they don't change how the message looks to a teammate on
another inbox, and they never travel with the email to the other side.

## Rules — file mail automatically

A rule watches new mail and does something with it before you ever see it —
handy for newsletters, receipts, or a project that should always land in one
place.

Open **Account → Mail → Incoming** to see your rules. The quickest way to make
one is straight from a conversation: when you file a message, tick **“Always
file mail from [sender] here”** and Doota offers to turn that into a rule.

A rule is **if this → do that**. You can match on:

- **from**, **to**, **cc**, **subject**, or **body** — *contains*, *equals*, or
  *matches*
- whether it has an **attachment**, its **size**, or the mailing **list** it came from

…and then have Doota:

- **move it** to a folder, or **label** / **unlabel** it
- **mark it read**, **star** it, or **mark it as spam**
- **snooze** it for a while, or **forward** a copy to another address
- **stop other rules** from running after this one

> **Note**
>
> Rules run top to bottom. Use the up/down arrows to order them, the switch to turn
> one off without deleting it, and **“stop other rules”** on a rule that should be
> the last word for the mail it catches.

### Applying a rule to mail you already have

New rules act on mail that arrives *after* you make them. To sweep your existing
inbox too, hit **Apply to existing** on the rule. You can also tick **“Also move
conversations I filed by hand”** if you want it to override your earlier manual
filing.

## Pin a conversation

Pin the one thread you keep scrolling back to find. Open it, use the **⋯** menu
in the header, and choose **Pin**. Pinned conversations sit in their own group at
the **top of the list**, above everything else, with a small pin marker on the
row. Choose **Unpin** from the same menu to send it back into the normal flow.

Pinning is yours alone, per mailbox — it doesn't affect teammates on a shared
inbox.

Source: https://docs.doota.dev/guide/organizing/index.mdx