Creating and Organizing Folders

Folders are how you keep your TrekMail Drive from turning into a single page of 800 random files. This guide covers everything folders can do — creating them, naming them, colouring them, nesting them, moving them, and the small habits that keep them useful as your account grows.

The mechanics are nearly identical between Account Drive (in the dashboard) and Webmail Drive (per-mailbox). Where they diverge, this article calls it out.

Creating a folder

Open Drive (Account Drive at /drive in the dashboard, or Webmail Drive inside any mailbox). Click New folder in the toolbar.

A dialog asks for two things:

• Name — what users will see in the file list and breadcrumb. Required.
• Color — optional. A coloured dot next to the folder name in the file list. Useful for visual grouping.

Click Create and the folder appears in your current location. The dialog defaults to creating in whatever folder you're currently inside, so step into the right parent first if you want a subfolder.

Naming rules

Slashes (/) and backslashes (\) are not allowed in folder names. Everything else is fine — spaces, punctuation, accents, emoji. Two folders inside the same parent cannot share an exact name; you'll be asked to pick a different one.

A few practical guidelines that pay off later:

• Be specific enough to mean something on its own. "Clients" beats "Stuff", but "Q1 Pitches" beats "Files" inside a Clients folder. The breadcrumb is short — it can't carry context that the folder name leaves out.
• Stay consistent across folders. If you use sentence case ("Brand assets") for one folder, use it for all of them. Mixed casing makes lists harder to scan.
• Avoid putting dates in the name unless dating is the point. Date-based folders age badly. "Active clients" stays right; "January 2025 clients" is wrong by February. If you really need to date something, suffix the name (Reports — 2026) so the alphabetical sort still groups it.

Color labels

When you create or edit a folder you can pick a colour from a palette. The colour shows as a small dot next to the folder name in any file list. Colours don't change permissions or behaviour — they're a visual aid for the people looking at the list.

Colour ideas that work well:

• By urgency. Red for "needs action," amber for "in progress," green for "done."
• By type. One colour for clients, another for internal, another for tax/legal.
• By owner. If multiple people share a Drive, each person picks a colour for the folders they own.

You don't have to use colours. Most folders work fine without one. Use colour for the handful you reach for daily and leave the long tail uncoloured.

To change a folder's colour later, open the three-dot menu next to its row, pick Rename / edit, and change the colour in the dialog.

Renaming and editing

Open the three-dot menu on any folder row and pick Rename / edit. The same dialog you used to create the folder reopens, with the current name and colour pre-filled. Change either, click Save.

Renaming a folder does not affect any of the files inside it. Existing public download links you've created for files in that folder keep working — the link points at the file, not at a path.

Moving folders into other folders

Open the three-dot menu and pick Move. A folder-tree picker opens showing every folder you can move into. Click the destination, click Move here, and the folder (with everything inside it) jumps to the new location.

You cannot move a folder into itself or into one of its own descendants. The picker hides those options to avoid the obvious mistake.

When you move a folder, the breadcrumb of every file inside updates. Public share links continue to work; the link is bound to the file's identity, not its path.

Nesting and depth

Folders can contain folders, which can contain folders, with no enforced depth limit. In practice, two to three levels handles almost every team's needs:

Clients/
├── Acme Corp/
│   ├── Contracts
│   ├── Brand assets
│   └── Past deliverables
├── Beta LLC/
│   └── ...
└── Gamma Inc/
    └── ...

If you find yourself going deeper, ask whether the structure is wrong. Common signs:

• You named two folders the same thing at different levels (e.g. "Drafts" inside three different folders). Consider whether they could merge into a top-level "Drafts" with a tag in each filename.
• You have a single folder with one item inside, and that item is another folder with one item inside. Collapse them.
• You're using folders to encode metadata that could be a filename suffix. "Clients/Acme/Active/Proposals" might be clearer as "Clients/Acme/Proposals" with active/closed as a status word in each filename.

Folder navigation

The file list shows folders at the top, then files, both alphabetical by default. Click a folder name to open it. The breadcrumb at the top shows your current path; click any segment to jump back to that level.

The left sidebar (in the dashboard view) shows a folder tree that you can expand and collapse. Use it to jump several levels in one click instead of breadcrumbing.

Special folder behaviours

A few situations where folders behave differently:

Sharing with the whole account

In Account Drive, the three-dot menu on any folder offers Share with account. This makes the folder visible to every mailbox in the account through their webmail Drive. The folder gets a small "Shared" badge in the dashboard view so you remember it's not private.

You can revoke sharing later via Stop sharing in the same menu — the folder reverts to dashboard-only visibility. Files inside are not deleted; only their visibility to mailbox owners changes.

The full flow lives in Sharing Folders with Your Team.

Top-level shared folders from webmail

The flip side: if a mailbox owner creates a top-level folder inside their webmail Drive and chooses Share with account at creation time, that folder is migrated into Account Drive — it becomes part of the account-wide space rather than the mailbox-private space. The owner can still see it, but so can every other mailbox.

This is useful when a mailbox owner is the natural author of a shared resource (the marketing lead curating brand assets, for instance) and doesn't want to round-trip through the account owner just to share.

Nested shares are inherited

You don't separately share each subfolder. When you share a top-level folder with the account, every subfolder it contains and every file inside is shared by extension. Move a folder into a shared parent and the moved folder inherits the share.

Conversely, you cannot have a shared folder with an unshared subfolder inside it. Sharing is parent-down only.

Trash

Delete a folder and it goes to Trash. Everything inside it goes too — files, subfolders, all the way down. Trashed folders are recoverable for 30 days; restoring a folder restores everything inside in its original structure. See Trash and File Restoration.

If a deleted folder was shared with the account, the share is paused while it's in Trash. Restoring it reactivates the share automatically.

Bulk actions on folders

Tick the checkbox next to multiple folders and the bulk action bar appears with Move, Move to Trash, and (if any are already in Trash) Restore and Delete forever options. Bulk moves use the same tree picker as the single-folder move, just applied to everything you've selected.

Working folder structures by team type

If you're starting fresh, here are structures that work well for different team sizes:

Small business / solo operator:

Brand assets
Templates
Clients/
Personal
Tax & accounting

Agency:

Brand assets (shared)
Templates (shared)
Clients/
├── Active/
└── Archive/
Internal/
├── Operations
├── HR
└── Finance

Internal IT / DevOps:

Runbooks (shared)
Architecture diagrams (shared)
Vendor contracts
Postmortems
Drafts

These are starting points. The first folder structure you build will not be the right one — you'll discover after a month which categories fight you and which feel natural. Reorganize without guilt; it's a folder tree, not a database migration.

What's next

• Uploading Files to Drive — once you have folders, fill them.
• Sharing Folders with Your Team — open up the right folders to mailbox owners.
• Bulk File Operations — when reorganizing, select many at once.
• Trash and File Restoration — undo a delete.