While tagging is super awesome, and I can find anything in about 3 seconds, it is not a great tool for an overview of your email. All you see is fifty tags on the left, sorted by name and this doesn’t help you look, feel or be organized.

A nifty Greasemonkey script, folders4gmail is a tool to help you organize your Gmail labels into groups, just like a folder structure. If tag mail from your family you could have “family”, “Mom”, “Dad”. You would see these tags quite far apart if you have many more, so enter folders4gmail.

If you create the following tags: “Family”, “Family/Mom”, “Family/Dad” you will be presented with an expanding list, showing you Mom and Dad as subcategories of Family.

You have two installation options. You need to install Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that allows you to modify popular web services like the example here and then download the folders4gmail script (this takes about 10 seconds overall). Alternatively you can grab the Better Gmail extension from Lifehacker. This adds many Greasemonkey scripts to Gmail, like widening the view, skins (on its way for the new Gmail) and a host of other stuff. The advantage here is that you don’t need Greasemonkey for it to work.

You can use Better Gmail with the old Gmail interface, it has more features, since the others are being converted, or you can use the new Better Gmail 2 with the new interface.

Download Greasemonkey from the Mozilla Addons Page
Download Folders4Gmail from Userscripts.org
Download Better Gmail from Lifehacker.com
Download Better Gmail 2 from Lifehacker.com