Labels Are Everything
With Gmail, labels are literally everything. It’s the one feature that I believe redefined email as we know it. It’s a quick and easy way for you to not just sort your email, but for you to have a visual representation of your email queue. But you didn’t come here to learn about labels. If you’re not sure what labels are, I’d refer you to the Gmail Labels support article to help catch you up to speed!
The Stickers project’s goal was to replace ugly subject appendages and replace them with better visual indicators, labels.
The Status Quo
For some reason, someone many years ago thought it was easy and user friendly to prepend [External] to emails. In theory, it’s a great idea since it draws attention to the fact that email is from an external party. Before service like Gmail were available, clients like Outlook and Apple Mail reigned king on the corporate and personal desktop. To make do with what was available technologically, a subject prefix made sense. However, some 15 years have passed and we are still taking this same approach to this day.
Subject: [External] Please update your banking information
Gross.
The idea from Stickers came from that same ask. At a previous position, the ask was simple: let employees know when an email was sent by an external party. Going along with the rest of the industry, the direction we received was to prepend [External] to all emails not matching the company domain. As we know, we could have done this, but it didn’t align with our values, nor did it make sense due to the amount of external emails we dealt with.
I proposed the idea to use Gmail Labels to identify mail programmatically, which everyone immediately agreed with. It was native to the Gmail client since POP/IMAP3 were disallowed, and it was attractive. But, there was no Google provided tooling to help facilitate this at scale. Building a service to do this took a few weeks and wrote it in Python, and we tested it heavily. We wanted to make sure it didn’t break everyones email experience as it also resulted in a change to the communication culture.
But Does It Stick?
Fast forward a few years and after using lessons learned from that project, I threw together Stickers. Stickers is written in Go, and uses a YAML-based configuration file to construct Gmail filters and labels. These are then applied to all users in the domain, on recurring intervals. If someone deletes the label or the filter, Stickers will make sure that the rules stick. All future email that is received, is then labeled appropriately, and prevents us from having to use a sensitive scope like gmail.manage. Luckily, Stickers uses an extremely non-permissive approach, using domain-wide delegation and acting on behalf of the user, versus a super admin service account (which should always be a no-no).
This allows admins to configure the experience for the team, allowing more work to get done and less fiddling with settings to take place. This includes giving the ability to make a domain-wide label for email retention policies, highlighting important messages like from the m-team or the CEO, etc. The configurations are easy, and the options are endless.
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