Video:Gmail: How to Organize Your Inbox

Transcript:Gmail: How to Organize Your Inbox

Hi, this is Frank Bayless for About.com and this is how to organize your Gmail inbox. 

Make Several Inboxes in Gmail

The first thing you want to do when trying to organize your inbox in Gmail is set up multiple inboxes. We do this by going to the settings tab in the upper right-hand corner and going to the settings in Gmail. Next you want to go to labs and scroll down all the way to multiple inboxes. You want to click enable multiple inboxes. What multiple inboxes does is adds extra lists of emails in your inbox to see even more important emails at once. The new list of  threads can be labels, or starred messages, drafts or any search you want, configurable under settings. Once you have enabled multiple inboxes in the lab you want to make sure you save your changes at the bottom. 

Now that were back at our home screen inbox you can see that I have already set up multiple inboxes. My first inbox is for all of my unread emails. This means that in my first inbox only the emails that I have not read yet will show up first when I log into Gmail. My second inbox underneath the first one is just a regular inbox in Gmail. 

To set up multiple inboxes after you have enabled it in labs go back to settings and go to multiple inboxes. Here you can set up up to five inboxes specified it to however you want. You can show how many conversations will be viewed per page for each inbox and where the inbox will be placed in your Gmail window. I have set it to where Gmail will do a search inquiry for only unread emails for my first inbox. 

Label Your Emails

The next thing to do to easily organize your Gmail inbox is to label your emails. What all do with one of my emails is check it and add a label to it. We can add a name for it and we can decide whether though they will be nested under another label, once you've decided those things click create. Another label has been applied to the email. If you go to the left-hand side in your Gmail inbox you can see all of your labels listed. This is where you can specify different colors for each of the labels so that they will stand out in your inbox. I'm in a go ahead and add blue to this label and as you can see blue has been added to this message so now I know exactly what this message is about before I have to open it.

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