Freebie: how to create your own gmail tabs

Google describes the new tabs as a way to “put you back in control so that you can see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read and when.”

You get five optional tabs, described by Google below. Google automatically sorts your inbox into these tabs using its special algorithms (essentially matching many of Gmail’s existing Smart Labels, which automatically filter incoming messages):

*

Gmail Smart Labels Add Automatic Inbox Filters for Mass Mail, Combat Email OverloadGmail’s powerful filters have long been one of its strongest features, if you’re willing to create…Read more

*

Primary: person-to-person conversations and messages that don’t appear in other tabsSocial: messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, and other social websitesPromotions: deals, offers, and other marketing emailsUpdates: personal, auto-generated updates including confirmations, bills, receipts, bills, and statementsForums: messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists

You can also choose to force starred emails from all tabs to display in the Primary tab (in addition to the other tab).

How to Enable and Use the Tabs

To enable the new tabbed view, go to the Gear icon and select “Configure inbox.” Once you do that, you’ll be prompted to choose which tabs to enable and Gmail will start doing its magic, auto-sorting your inbox.

Watching: Freebie: how to create your own gmail tabs

You can drag-and-drop emails from one tab to the next; when you do that, Gmail will ask if you want to create a filter for that sender to send messages in the future to that tab. Handy! It doesn’t, however, move existing emails into that tab.

You can also create your own filters to send emails into specific tabs, as we’ll see below, but that’s tricky if you don’t understand how the new tabs differ from Gmail’s existing labels and which messages get sorted into tabs.

Why the Tabs Are So Confusing

The tabs do give you a convenient way to automatically sort your inbox according to Gmail’s preset categories and get notifications at a glance for when new emails come in. However, the tabbed view introduces a new, not-so-clear element in Gmail called “categories.”

See Also:  Set up Email on iPhone 10/13: A Comprehensive Guide

*

The tabs are based on these new categories. When you create a filter, in addition to being able to label a message, you can now categorize it as: Personal, Social, Updates, Promotions, or Forums from a drop-down box. These, as you see, match the tabs.

The problem is, you already have labels that also match these categories. Gmail, for example, adds Social Updates, Promotions, and Forums as SmartLabels in the left menu. The “Notifications” SmartLabel corresponds to the Updates tab (I wonder why they didn’t just call the tab Notifications), but SmartLabels are not the same as Categories. Gmail’s pre-designed SmartLabel filters makes it seem like that, but they’re really two different things.

I also noticed one problem where certain messages would show up under a SmartLabel, but not a category. For example: Some auto-labeled “Notifications” didn’t show up under my “Updates” tab.

It turns out the tabs only include emails from your inbox, not archived emails. In other words, the tabs are really just another view of your inbox. You can have more emails in the corresponding label than in the tabs if some of those emails are archived.

So, a few things we’ve discovered from testing:

If you have filters for daily deals emails and similar emails that would get categorized by Gmail as “Promotions” but have it set to skip the inbox (archive them), you won’t see them in the Promotions tab unless you change those filters. The same goes for the other tabs.If you want to filter messages into a specific tab, you’ll have to use the new “Categorize” option, not the labels. Gmail has added a new “Categories” label in the left menu with sub-labels for the categories, which match the tabs. In other words, all the messages under specific tabs are also in the corresponding Categories sub-label. Tip: If you want to briefly switch away from tabbed view and see all the emails at once across all the tabs, click on the Categories label.Now you’ll have labels and categories with the same names. If you want to avoid confusion, you can just delete the old SmartLabels, since you can still access them through the categories in the sidebar. Alternatively, you could just hide them from the sidebar so they don’t clutter it up.If you want to see the unread count for messages in the tabs, you have to click the Categories label name to expand the sub-labels. The tabs themselves only show when you have new messages, not the number of unread messages.As mentioned above, when drag-and-dropping across tabs, you can create a new filter for future messages. However, this doesn’t work if you select multiple email messages and drag them, unfortunately.Confused yet? Gmail’s SmartLabels aren’t perfect, and neither are the tabs. Gmail has been consistently labeling some personal emails as Promotions and putting some promotional emails in the Primary tab for me. It also seems like there’s a fine line between Social and Forums messages.

See Also:  How many emails can i send at once in gmail

See more: Download All Latest Versions Google Account Manager Apk 8, Google Account Manager 7

All of this said, it may be possible to harness the organizational power of the new tabbed interface to suit your needs better.

How to Customize the Tabs with Your Own Filters

As mentioned above, you can now create your own filters to categorize messages, thus putting them in one of these tabs. So if you have no use for the “Forums” tab, you can instead use it to collect messages from specific senders or keywords. Unfortunately, there’s no way to change the tab name.

The key is to make sure the filter doesn’t overlap an existing filter that might counteract what you’re trying to do. For example, you can’t have “Skip the inbox” on a matching filter, otherwise it won’t appear in the tabs at all (since the tabs are organization for the inbox).

To customize the tabs:

Create a new filter for the messages you want moved to one of the tabs. (For example, since I have no use for the Social tab on my work email, I’m using it instead to store emails I send to myself from my personal email address. In the search box, I put in “from:” and click the down arrow in the search box to find the “Create filter with this search” link.)In the filter options in the next screen, choose the category that matches the tab for the “Categorize as” option. (E.g., I chose “Categorize as: Social.”)You’ll also have to check “Exclude from SmartLabels” just in case Gmail tries to categorize your email differently (as it did for one of my test emails to myself). Then hit “Create filter.”

See Also:  How to Contact Chase Bank Customer Service - FairShake

At the very least, the new “Categorize as:” filter can help you correct any Gmail errors when it comes to SmartLabels. For example, by creating a filter to categorize fellow httl.com.vn/en editors’ emails as “Personal,” they now appear in my Primary tab, instead of, oddly, the Promotions or Forums one. They’re still strangely “Smart”Labeled as Promotions, but at least they’re in the right tab.

How to Disable the Tabbed Inbox If You Don’t Like It

If you don’t like the new feature, it’s pretty easy to get a more traditional inbox back. Just click on the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner, go to “Configure Inbox,” and uncheck everything except “Primary.” This will remove the tabs and bring you back to the old, familiar, one-inboxed interface.

Thinking about Gmail’s new tabs, SmartLabels, regular labels, and filters can feel like you’re trying to solve an annoying circular reference error in Excel. However, the new tabbed view might come in handy if you know how to harness it.

See more: Gmail Quick Tip: Use Color Code Your Gmail Inbox With Labels

DISCUSSION

By
MUAHUAHUAHUAHUAUHA

If the layout is confusing then you are likely going to fall behind on future UI’s. User interfaces are only going to get more complicated as time progresses with more integration than ever. I still know when I get email, I just know when I have important email and junk email that I subscribe to for say a mailing list or deals.

Categories: Mail

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *