5 Best Tips to Keep Your Gmail Inbox Clean

5 Best Tips to Keep Your Gmail Inbox Clean

A clean and well-organized Gmail inbox is everyone’s dream. It gives you the feeling of being on top and free. However, many users struggle to keep their Gmail inbox clean and often struggle to organize important and relevant emails. While there are several solutions, we’ll focus on the top five tips for keeping your Gmail inbox clean.


Decluttering Gmail Inbox

Before you begin, you need to remember that keeping your inbox clean is a never-ending, lifelong struggle. However, you can apply the tips we suggest to alleviate some of that chore.

Here are the top tips for keeping your Gmail inbox clean on your computer and mobile devices.

1. Use mail categories

While adding labels to your existing emails is useful, you can also control which emails you receive before they arrive. How? ‘Or’ What? By categorizing emails.

To create categories, follow the steps below.

Step 1: In your Gmail account, go to the Settings icon and click on Show all settings.

2nd step: In the Inbox tab, check off all the categories that you want to display on your page. Remember, however, that your inbox type should be set as default.

Gmail Categories


Gmail Categories

It should be noted that while you can choose which categories are visible, you cannot create new ones.

2. Create email labels

By default, the majority of emails arrive in the inbox and most of them are marked as important. Even when you use email categories, a lot of emails end up going to your primary inbox.

In Gmail, you can use labels to automatically organize incoming emails. Here are the steps you can take.

Step 1: Open Gmail in a browser and sign in to your Gmail account.

2nd step: Click the “Create New Label” button in the sidebar.

Gmail sidebar


Gmail sidebar

Step 3: Enter whatever name you want to give it and select whether you want a particular label to appear under another.

Gmail create label


Gmail create label

Step 4: Repeat this process for all the labels you create.

When you’ve created different labels, it’s a good idea to start applying labels to relevant emails. Then you can decide which ones are essential and which ones you can reject.

Refer to the top tips and tricks of Gmail labels to organize and manage them.

3. Automatically forward emails

If you don’t want to process all your emails in one place, automatically forwarding them will save them to another account. This way, you don’t have to worry about archiving or deleting those emails.

To automatically forward emails, you need to log into your Gmail account and follow these steps.

Step 1: Go to the Settings icon and choose Show all settings.

Gmail Settings tab


Gmail Settings tab

2nd step: Go to Forwarding and POP / IMAP.

Gmail settings transfer and pop


Gmail settings transfer and pop

Step 3: Select Add forwarding address and enter the email address you want to forward to.

Gmail add forwarding address


Gmail add forwarding address

Step 4: Confirm on the other email address that you want to receive the emails.

Email forwarding enter the address


Email forwarding enter the address

4. Mute email conversations

With the rise of instant messaging services, most conversations are unnecessary by email. But in some cases, you may find yourself copied to an irrelevant discussion in your Gmail inbox.

While you can ask others to remove you from the thread, they might not say yes. So you can instead take matters into your own hands and use the Mute option.

To deactivate a conversation on Gmail, you can follow the steps below.

Step 1: Open the Gmail app on your phone.

2nd step: When your inbox loads, hold the conversation you want to mute.

Step 3: Once the email is highlighted in blue with a check mark next to it, navigate to the three dots in the upper right corner.

Step 4: Select Mute from the list of options.

Mute gmail


Mute gmail

Step 5: Your conversation will now be cut off.

5. Use filters

One of the best ways to keep your Gmail inbox clean is to use filters. In short, filters allow you to choose what happens to certain emails you receive.

Consider deleting them, automatically archiving them, or marking them as read to keep your Gmail inbox clean.

To use filters in Gmail, follow the steps below.

Step 1: Log into your Gmail account on your desktop.

2nd step: Go to the Settings icon and click on View all settings. Then go to Filters and blocked addresses.

Gmail filters page


Gmail filters page

Step 3: Type the email address or search terms you want to display, and then tap create filter.

Step 4: Choose what you want to do when these messages arrive.

Step 5: Select Create Filter.

Gmail filters


Gmail filters

You can also override the filters for important messages. To do this, you will need to follow the same steps as above to access filters and blocked addresses.

Once you’re there and open the Create Filter tab, you can select Always mark it as important or add it to a tag.

Keep your Gmail inbox clean

If you don’t know how, keeping your Gmail inbox clean is frustrating. But the app itself has a lot of tools that can help you achieve this.

Once you’ve tried all of these tips, remember to regularly empty your inbox rather than waiting for things to pile up.

Last updated on April 23, 2021

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