You can then cycle beyond the regular yellow star by clicking again (andagain) on the star symbol next to messages in your Gmail inbox on the web.īesides helping you better organize your emails into different lists or priority rankings (urgent, needs following up, family or whatever), you can also use these stars with searches-try “has:green-star” in the Gmail search box, for example. Switch to the General tab and under Stars you’ll see a total of 12 stars and other symbols you can make use of.ĭrag the small icons to the top row to have the associated stars enabled in Gmail. Open up the Settings pane on the web by clicking the cog icon on the right then choosing Settings. Gmail’s system for starred emails is more extensive than it might seem at first glance. Take a few moments, when you can, to dive into the spam folder and fish out genuine emails, as well as flagging junk messages in your main inbox that Gmail hasn’t caught automatically-as time goes on, you should find spam email becomes less and less of a problem. On the web, just click and drag emails to put them in different tabs-Gmail then asks if you want to sort all future emails like this in the same way.ĭon’t neglect your spam folder either. Your Gmail inbox is most likely split up into tabs for social media emails, less important updates and so on, if you’re using the default layout (click the arrow next to Inbox on the left to change the view). If Google has got it wrong, click this yellow arrow to mark the email as not important (or vice versa). Take email importance, for example: emails that seem important by Google’s standards get put in the Primary tab, with a yellow arrow next to them. Google tries to do some clever email sorting for you, but if you take a few minutes each day to help it along, it’s going to get smarter over time.

Take a minute to help train Google’s algorithms The real power of the Gmail filtering system comes with what you can do with emails once they’ve been highlighted as matching your criteria: they can be marked as important or not important, starred, marked as read, sent straight to the archive, given a particular label, and more besides. You can identify emails with attachments too. You can also create filters from inside individual conversation threads by clicking the menu button (three dots) on the right, then choosing Filter messages like this.įilters cover all kinds of different scenarios: it’s possible to pick out emails based on who sent them, or words that appear (or don’t appear) in the body of the email, or how big (or small) the emails are. On the Gmail web interface, you can create a filter by clicking the arrow to the right of the search box, then setting out your criteria. Speaking of filtering, filters are one of the best ways to tame an unruly Gmail inbox.

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