Labels
What are labels?

Missive offers two kinds of labels: email labels, which sync with your email accounts, and organization labels, which are tied to your Missive organization.

What are email labels?

Email labels are synced back and forth between your email account (Gmail, Office 365, IMAP) and Missive. Coworkers you give full access to your email account on Missive will have access to all the labels of that email account.

What are organization labels?

Organization labels are Missive-only labels that are not synced to an email account. An organization label can be applied to any conversation, whether it's an email, SMS, social media or an internal chat conversation. Organization labels have advanced settings and use cases you can learn more about here.

What label types should I use?

Organization labels are more flexible than email labels, but they don't sync back to your email server. Here is a table summarizing all the differences between the two:

Type Advantages Weaknesses
Email labels
  • Sync with your email server in both directions (Gmail, Office 365, etc.)
  • Automatically created when importing an existing email account.
  • When using multiple email accounts, same label might need to be duplicated in each account.
  • Cannot be used on non-email messages (SMS, chat, social media, etc.)
  • User access tied to the email account sharing settings.
  • Do not trigger label changed rules.
Organization labels
  • Can be applied to all message types (SMS, chat, social media, etc.)
  • You can use one label for emails received in multiple email accounts.
  • Ability to automatically share conversations by applying a label.
  • You can upload a custom icon (image) linked to a label.
  • Can trigger label changed rules.
  • Not synced to your email server.

How to manage a label?

Creating labels is simple, you can do it from the Settings > Labels. Or you can create them when viewing a conversation, just click on the label icon at the top of the conversation, like this:

Missive HQ Location
You can open this menu with a keyboard shortcut: Command + Shift + L

Editing (color, description, etc.) and deleting labels is done from Settings > Labels or by right-clicking on one in the sidebar and selecting the Edit label option.

How to open labels in the sidebar?

To open and keep a label in the sidebar, click the + More menu then find and select that label. If you prefer to only navigate to a label without keeping it open in the sidebar, you can press the Option key while clicking on it.

You can also quickly find and open labels using the search input at the top of the conversation list (Command + F to select the input), just type the first few characters of your labels. The same Option trick applies if you want to navigate to the label without pinning it to your sidebar.

Lastly, you can use the Command Bar menu by typing Command + E and searching for the Go to label option:

Need more specific answers?

Contact us via our Help Center