How to enable multiple inboxes in Gmail
You can waste an awful lot of time going back and forth between your different labels and folders within Gmail. If you need to view something on the left-hand side, you can only go into that label. Then, if you want to go back to your inbox, you have to click up over here.
Well, in today's video, I'm going to share with you a little-discussed feature that might just transform the way you manage your email. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you get more done and enjoy less stress.
Wouldn't it be great if you could click a little less and just access the emails or types of information you want right here within Gmail? Well, under Settings, we have an option to create Multiple Inboxes, and this is going to give us an advantage by allowing us to create various ways to access our email.
When you first click on the Settings gear tab, you'll notice a number of different options down below, including Inbox Type. By default, you're probably going to see something like this—just your basic inbox. You may already have customized filters that send certain emails to other labels right away, but this is typically our default view. However, you can choose a few other options.
Way at the bottom is something called Multiple Inboxes. You can turn on multiple inboxes right away by selecting this radio button, and you can edit it by selecting this link.
But I also want to make sure you know how to get here from the traditional way. At the very top, if we select See All Settings, you're probably familiar with this General tab. The third one in is titled Inbox, and we can also access it here as well.
So, right here at the very top,
Adding inbox labels and filters
We have the selection for Inbox Type, and we've just been looking at our default view. Here, we can see those other options as well, but the last one is where we want to pay our attention: Multiple Inboxes.
You're going to be presented with something like this: five different sections, which we can customize either by filter, by some other Gmail search queries, or even give them a customized name so that we can see additional information. Let me show you how this works.
I already have one here called is, meaning I want any emails that I've starred to be in my very first section. But let's take a look at what else we can add as well. The next one down I'm going to set to is. In this case, I'm referring to my Urgent label, which you can see here on the left-hand side.
Keep in mind, you can't just click into these fields and expect a drop-down to appear. Not only can you select some key labels you've created on the left-hand side, but you can also create a fairly complex filter based on a date range or urgency. If you'd like to learn more about specific Gmail and Google search filters, I encourage you to click the video on the screen right now.
For section number three, for example, I'm going to use from instead of is. I'll enter my own email address. Let's pretend in this case that this email address belongs to my boss, a coworker, or a very important client, and I want to make sure I see their emails so they don't get buried with all of my other emails. So, here I have my three different search queries.
I'll come back to the Search Name in just a moment, but let's go to the very bottom of the screen and don't forget to select Save changes.
Now, we are going to be brought back to our inbox,
What multiple inboxes look like
But it looks a little different, doesn't it? Yes, here on the right-hand side, we have our multiple inboxes with our different sections. We have the starred emails at the top, my urgent emails next, and then at the bottom, we have my Scott@Simpletivity emails.
These are always going to be displayed in conjunction with my main email inbox account on the left-hand side. So, not only can I continue to manage the messages that I normally would in my inbox, but I can also have certain messages filter up to the top and deal with them here at the exact same time.
Now, first thing: right in the middle, if you hover your cursor, you can adjust the size of this split. If I want to make it nice and tiny, I can drag this all the way to the right and still have access to any of these emails. If I want to click on an email, it will open up just as it normally would. I can reply and forward as I usually do, but when I go back, I can still see these emails here on the right-hand side.
Let me make this just a little bit bigger for our example. Some other things for us to consider: we don't always have to have them visible like this. We can minimize these sections. For example, maybe I just want to keep an eye on emails from Scott for the rest of the afternoon. I can have that section expanded while minimizing my other sections. Or, I can minimize them altogether until I actually need them.
The nice thing is that I can get directly to this information without hiding my main inbox here in the front of my screen.
Let's go back to our settings.
Multiple inbox settings and options
Remember there's two ways to get to it. We can go to See all settings. I'm going to come down here and select Customize this time, which is going to bring me back to the exact same section. So we can add as many as five different sections here. Thing to note though is that you cannot simply drag and drop these sections around, which is kind of unfortunate.
So for example, if I want to change and have this from email address as my first section, I'm actually going to have to cut and paste this, put it up here, and then put this starred somewhere else. So you might want to take a little bit of time to consider what order you would like your sections to be in.
But another nice feature is that we can actually name these. Remember, this looked a little, well, shall we say just a little messy? Let's go back to that inbox for a second here. We've got things like is:starred,
is:urgent, from. I mean, I know what that means, but maybe I'd like something that is a little more aesthetically pleasing or maybe just a little more direct, especially if I have a complex filter or something there applied.
So if we come back here, we can go to the section name and we can say very important emails, maybe something like that. For my urgent, maybe I'll keep with urgent or I could add something maybe like a stop sign or a red color, something like that. I'm just going to go with an emoji, in this case, and I'm going to say emails from me, maybe something like that. So it's something a lot more descriptive. So I don't have to be staring at the search query. I can look at the section name.
Now there's two other things that we want to pay attention to here on the Inbox tab. Down below, we have the maximum page size, and this is referring to the number of conversations which it is going to show per section. So right now I have it set to 9, but maybe I want to reduce that a bit. I'm going to set this down to 5 conversations per page. I'm going to show you how that looks but also how you can access all of those conversations from those section areas.
And then the last thing we want to pay attention to is the multiple inbox position. Now, in this case, I have it set as right of the inbox. I personally feel that this is maybe the most convenient because you can see your inbox in full view in the top left, and then you can see your multiple inboxes to the right. But you can also choose to display them above your inbox or below the inbox as well. So depending on your preference, you can make that selection here.
Once again, we want to come all the way down to the bottom and select Save changes for anything that we've done here to take effect. So, now you can see, I've got my much cleaner, my much more aesthetically pleasing labels or titles for these sections, very important emails, I've got my stop sign here representing my urgent emails and then emails from me.
And just like we said that we wanted to limit it to a maximum of five emails displayed, you can see, we've only got five per section. Well, maybe only four here because I only have four starred emails. But for the other ones, you can see it is showing me 5 of 11 and 5 of many. So if I want to go beyond and access the emails in this section, all I need to do is select this 5 of many, and it's going to open up all of those emails for that particular filter.
Now I can just go back to my inbox at any time and I'm brought back here as well. And the great thing is, is that everything still applies. Let's say that I want to maybe delete this email and these two emails and this email here, I'm selecting the check boxes. I can come up here and select Delete. So I don't have to do it by section, I can select multiple things at any given time and access them right here on the same screen
Things to consider before using multiple inboxes
Now, just a couple of caveats you should be made aware of before you start to transform your entire multiple inbox view. Number one, applying these changes to your inbox, whether it's in this section or over here within your traditional inbox, will not take effect immediately.
So let's say, for example, I'm going to star this email here and I'm also going to star this one as well. You'll notice that two new emails did not appear here immediately. I still only have these three. I would actually need to refresh the screen in order for those changes to take place. Here, after doing a quick refresh, now I have both of those emails listed here as well. And that's going to go in both directions.
The other thing you may want to be made aware of is that we cannot simply drag an email from one section to another. So, for example, let's take a look at this "Sticking with a habit" email. Maybe I'd like to make it an urgent email. I can't simply just go like this and drag it into my urgent area and move it and apply that urgent label. It's not going to do so.
What I can do is I can still grab that email and drag it into my urgent label folder over here if I want, and that does actually bring it immediately into this section area. Now, if you have any questions about how to use multiple inboxes right here within Gmail, be sure to leave it in the comments down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
