Unlock Gmail's Full Potential

Google’s Gmail is the most popular email platform in the world, with over 1.8 billion users as of 2023. So statistically, it’s a safe bet that most of us have at least one Gmail account – perhaps maybe even more than one. Yet despite its popularity, some of Gmail’s coolest features are buried in the settings where most users will probably never see them. This month, let’s dig into those settings and look at some neat tricks you can do with Gmail that can help increase your productivity.

Finding Settings

First off, your Gmail settings can be found by clicking the small gear icon in the top-right of your inbox, in the same row as your inbox search bar. Clicking will reveal a rather poorly designed “quick settings” dropdown menu, but you will see a link that says “See all settings” at the top of this display. Click that to see a tabbed menu of all possible settings for Gmail.

There’s lots to see and customize here if you want to explore on your own, but I want to highlight the ones I personally find the most useful for organization and productivity. (Note: if you make any changes to your settings, make sure you press the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.)

Multiple Stars

For those of us who aren’t familiar with the concept, Gmail allows you to quickly tag an email message with a star by pressing the empty star icon to the left of the message subject in your inbox. You can then list all starred messages simply by clicking “Starred” in the lefthand menu under “Inbox”.

By default, the star icon acts as a simple toggle to either star or unstar a message, but in your settings you can actually enable the use of multiple colored stars and/or additional icons for tagging messages. In the first settings tab labeled “General”, scroll way down until you find the setting aptly called “Stars”. Here, you can drag and drop the little colored icons between “In use” and “Not in use” as you wish; any icons that are in use will appear sequentially as you click the star icon next to your message in your inbox. 

Personally, I use the star feature a lot – nearly to the point that the whole concept of a starred message is irrelevant – so this neat visual trick helps me further organize starred messages based on my own system of importance.

Labels and Filters

Gmail grants you lots of flexibility in controlling what happens to your inbound messages through the use of labels and filters.

Firstly, go under Settings and select the “Labels” tab. Here you’ll find a list of Gmail’s predefined labels (e.g. Starred, Sent, Trash, Drafts) and categories (e.g. Social, Updates, Promotions), but below these is a section where you can create custom labels of your own for tagging messages. Labels can be applied manually to any message in your inbox by right-clicking on it and selecting “Label as”. You can then start to search and sort your inbox using these labels which can really help your organization.

However, to really get your inbox working for you, you can use labels in conjunction with mail filters. Filters can be found under a different Settings tab called “Filters and Blocked Addresses”.

Here, click on the link that says “Create a new filter” to get started.

Setting up a filter is done in two steps. Step one is to define the criteria by which this filter will match inbound messages. You can match messages based on sender or recipient, subject or message body content, message size, attachments, or any combination of these. Step two is then to define what actions should be taken on any matched message. You can forward it, delete it, star it, mark it as read, and/or tag it with any custom labels you’ve created. Using labels and filters together, you can drastically reduce your inbox management based on your needs.

Multiple Inboxes

This is one of my favorite features that almost no one takes advantage of – the ability to create custom inbox sections based on your own search or filter criteria. This is just like sorting emails into tabs, except there’s no need to switch between tabs because all your inboxes are displayed at the same time. To find it, go under Settings to the “Inbox” tab, and then change the “Inbox Type” setting to “Multiple Inboxes”.

This presents you with five text boxes where you can enter your criteria for creating each inbox section. You could, for example, create a section of your inbox for just a single contact so that only that person’s emails are visible, followed by another section that contains all unread messages regardless of sender, followed by yet another section for all your starred emails. Like so:

You can have these custom sections appear to the right of, above, or below your normal inbox depending on your preference, and you can change how many emails are visible at a time in each one. With these settings, you can have these sections completely replace your standard inbox, or just use them to supplement your existing workflow.