Gmail has added another Lab feature, just a few days after adding some more functionality to Labels which made them more folder-ish. The new feature is Multiple Inboxes, but it’s really more like Multiple Panes.

You enable Multiple Inboxes in Gmail Labs by going to Settings, Labs. After you do that, however, you have to go back into Settings and click on the hyperlink that should now appear called “Multiple Inboxes.” Once there you can can create up to five different panes.

While you can’t really put email from other accounts into the additional panes, if you do as I do, meaning forward emails from my personal account to Gmail and then label them, you can simulate that behavior.

By default, the first time you enable it you will get a pane with starred emails and a pane with drafts, in addition to the normal pane. To create your own pane requires a bit more work that most Gmail users probably would be comfortable with.

For example, if you want to have a pane with emails labeled “Work,” you would type label:Work (case sensitive) in the Pane Field. You can combine terms in a pane, such as is:drafts OR label:Work.

Did I like it? No, for a couple of reasons. It makes the primary pane narrower, which means less of the preview that you can normally see is visible. Perhaps if they made the preview wrap into multiple lines …

Also, the right hand panes for the “extra mailboxes” don’t have the checkboxes I find so useful for doing operations on multiple messages.

So for now, I turned it off. I’m sure many will find it useful, and as they make further tweaks, so will I.