Gmail has its own terminology and worldview when it comes to handling email, so you have some new terms and ideas to get used to. Here are the most common Gmail concepts:
Labels. Think of these as email folders. Your regular email program has a folder called Inbox, for example, and lets you create other folders, such as Family, Work, and so on. Gmail calls these email containers labels.
That said, there is a slight underlying difference between the way you work with Gmail’s labels and how you work with your email program’s folders. In your typical email program, you might move mail between folders by dragging them. Not so in Gmail. In Gmail, you affix a label to an email message. When you do that, that email automatically appears when you sort for that label.
Labels actually give you more flexibility than folders, since you can attach multiple labels to a single email message to have it show up in multiple labels. For example, if you get an email from your brother about advice for your upcoming trip to France, you can add the labels Family and France to the email. That email then shows up in both your Family label, and your France label.
The Droid 2 Gmail app is designed to work in concert with Gmail on the Web. So you can’t do everything in the Gmail app that you can do on the Web. The Droid 2 Gmail app can’t create labels, for example, so to create new ones, you must visit your Gmail account on the Web, either using the Droid 2 browser or a computer.
Overall mail organization. Because Gmail uses labels rather than folders, you may find mail in more than one location. Also, unlike some email software, Gmail gives you the option of viewing all mail in one single area titled All Mail, including both mail that you’ve sent and that you’ve received.
Chats appear in Gmail on both the web client and on the Droid 2.
Archive. In some instances, you’ll get mail that you want to keep around but don’t want showing up in your inbox, because your inbox would otherwise get too cluttered. So Gmail lets you archive messages. Archiving a message doesn’t delete it, but it removes it from your inbox. You can still find the message listed in your All Mail folder. You can also find it by searching.