Labels are misleading

[gardenweed]

In my testing of the use of Labels and conversation mode, I find them wanting and misleading with respect to the "location" of emails.

My example:
I have an email conversation that contains 4 emails.
In folder view, the locations of each email are clearly show on the right hand side of each email and are shown as (in order):

1. NamedFolder
2. Sent
3. Inbox
4. Inbox

When I swap from Folder view to Labels, the conversation simply shows the following labels at the top of the conversation:

• Inbox
• NamedFolder

The Labels view does not tell me that one email is in "Sent".
And, if I view each of the emails, I cannot see which label has been assigned to an individual email.

So in Labels view, it might appear that all the emails in the conversation have both Inbox label and FolderName label. But they don't. One even should have the label "Sent" but this is not indicated at the top of the conversation as being one of the labels being used in the conversation.
Thus my claim of being mislead by Labels.
The story told by labels in conversation mode is neither clear not complete.

Currently I archive my old emails by shifting all conversations for a particular topic (received and sent) into a folder, then downloading the archive for that folder.

I can't see how I can achieve the same using labels, because I cannot see which emails have been assigned a specific label. Without that information, I can't assign the correct label to an email for archiving.

Seems a loss of functionality to me.

What are others experiences using labels and organising email?

[gardenweed]

I contacted FM support about this and asked about having emails within a conversation being marked individually with the label that has been assigned,

The response was that this was not necessary because when a label is applied to a conversation, all emails in that conversation are assigned the label.

"Since applying a label to a conversation would apply the same to all emails in that conversation..."

Unfortunately this is only partially correct and carries with it a second problem.

Problem-A
It is only partially correct because if a label is assigned to an existing conversation, then the emails that are in Sent are not assigned this label. They retain the Sent label only.
This means that if you later archive via a Label, the archive will miss all the emails that reside in Sent that were associated with the conversations for that label. You get only half the conversation.

Problem-B
The other problem that I point to above is with any new emails that arrive in a conversation that is already labelled. These new emails do not inherit the label of the conversation even though you will see them in that conversation with the particular label sitting at the top of the conversation. Again this poses a future archive issue.

You could delete the existing label from a conversation and then re-assign that label. This will assign the label to all the emails in that conversation - except those in Sent.
Back to Problem-A.

For now, Labels are not an option for me.