Ask HN: Do you use stars to mark messages in Gmail?

I have used it, but it is too limited. If they had made it a variable scale (i.e. 0-5 stars) that would have made it vastly more practical and functional.

The way that it is presented as a "remember this item" or "note this for later reference", is completely redundant when you consider that everything you archive is "save this for later".

So to actually answer your question: No. I tried and gave up.

Yes, all the time. I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists and noisy "stuff", so I use stars heavily to flag threads that are important, so they don't drown in the noise. If I need to revisit a thread that is more than a day or two old, and I know it's important (and therefore should have been starred) I just go straight to the "starred" view. Only if it isn't near the top and easy to find to I fall back to keyword search.

I've also started using labels more lately as well, and find that pretty handy. Anything sales related, for example, gets a special label. This is especially handy for unsolicited inbound leads.