Google’s data-crunching ways found that the majority of Gmail users aren’t actually using the webmail service’s labels. Starting today, those label names get higher placement, and drag-and-drop labeling aims to make Gmail’s labels more like familiar email folders.

By placing users’ own labels higher up on the left-hand sidebar, right below the main Inbox/Starred/Sent/Drafts/All Mail destinations, Gmail admits that keeping them in their own box, stuck underneath the chat widget, implied they weren’t that important before. Fixes like those contained in Gina’s Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension and the “Go to label” keyboard shorcut in Gmail’s Labs section helped, but now labels are easier to reach, and kept more at the front of your email-clearing mind.

The three labels you use most are automatically shown below your main links, with the rest accessible from an “X more” drop-down. You can add more labels to your shown list, however, by clicking the downward-facing arrow next to a label and choosing “Show label.”

Those higher-up labels are also a boon to frequent mouse users, as you can now click and drag single email messages, or multiple selected messages, onto a label to “move” it into that label (kind of like a folder, no?), or drag the label onto the messages to, uh, label them.

All these features and functionality will be “rolling out gradually” to Gmail users.

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