Google Workspace: Gmail - Inbox Management

Organise your Inbox

The image below will help you understand what you see when looking at your inbox and help organise your inbox. We’ll be going through many of these features throughout this guide.

Labels (Not Folders)

Gmail doesn’t use folders like GroupWise or Outlook, instead you have Labels. This allows you to categorize your email. Labels are like folders, but with a twist- you can apply several labels to an email then later find the email by clicking any of its labels from the left panel.

You can keep the emails in your inbox with a label or you can move emails in to a label, just like moving emails into folders.

You can also:

Open a label in the left sidebar to see all emails with that label.
Nest labels within labels.
Search for all email with a label.
Customize labels with colours to easily identify an email.
See labels on email in your inbox to easily identify an email.
Use labels like email rules and move emails automatically.

Labels - Create

There are two methods to create or manage labels in Gmail, both can be seen below:

Create a label:

In the top right, click Settings > Settings.
Click the Labels tab.
Scroll to the Labels section and click Create new label.
Enter the label name and click Create.
You can also create nested labels, which are like subfolders

Add a color to a label:

In the left panel, point to a label and click More.
Point to Label color and choose a color. Or, click Add custom color.
The change instantly applies to all email with that label.
(Optional) To remove a label color, point to Label color and click Remove color.
(Optional) To see all email with a particular label, in the left panel, click the label’s name.

Create a label from an email:

From an email, click Labels > Create new.
Enter the label name and click Create.
(Optional) Click Nest label under and choose an existing label to place it under.
The new label automatically applies to your email.

Labels – Apply & Move emails

Apply a label to an email.

In your Inbox, tick the boxes next to the email you want to apply a label to.
Click the Labels icon.
Tick the boxes next to the labels you want to add and click Apply.

Alternatively, with an email open click the Labels icon and select the labels, then click Apply.

Move email out of your inbox to labels the same way you did with folders.

In your inbox, tick the boxes next to the email you want to move into a label.
Click Move to, indicated by a folder icon with an arrow inside.
Click the label you want to move your email to.

Labels – Apply & Move emails

You can use filters to automatically manage your inbox and add labels to emails so you don’t have to do it yourself. They work just like rules in other email services.

Follow the steps below to do this and you can see our suggestions for filters below the instructions.

Open Gmail and in the search box, click the Down arrow.
Add any of the filter criteria that appears.
Click Create filter.
To automatically move email fitting your filter criteria out of your inbox, tick Skip the Inbox (Archive it).
To apply a label, tick Apply the label, then click an existing label or create a new one.
Click Create filter.
1. If a new label is created, the new label appears in the left sidebar.

Here are some of our suggestions:

E.g. – What you want to achieve – Filter criteria – Suggested label

Add a label to email from anyone outside of Barton – From: -@barton.ac.uk – External

Add a label to all internal email – From: *@barton.ac.uk – Internal

Label email from a specific person – From: theiremail@theiremail.co.uk (Example – wjt@barton.ac.uk) – VIP

Add a label to promotional material – Has the words: category:promotion – Promotion

Mark emails as urgent – To: youremail+urgent@barton.ac.uk (Example – wjt+urgent@barton.ac.uk) – Urgent

The + addition to the email is called Task Specific emails, we will cover this and more in the Extra Features section of this guide.

Stars

If you want to flag an important email, click the Star icon next to the email in your inbox. It will give you a gold star next to that email and you can use the Starred label in the left sidebar to view all your starred email.

Types of Star

You get the gold star as default but you can have up to 12 different stars, 6 of these aren’t actually stars but rather icons that you can use to flag an email.

To enable the other stars, follow the steps below:

In the top right, click Settings > Settings.
Scroll down in the General tab and locate Stars.
Drag the stars you want to use up to the In use section and any you don’t want to the Not in use section.
1. (Optional) Click the 4 stars preset or the all stars preset to use one of these suggestions.
Scroll down to the bottom and click Save Changes.

The screenshot here shows the Stars section of the Settings menu. As you can see, there are 6 alternative stars including exclamation marks, ticks and question marks.

Once you’ve enabled the stars, simply keep clicking the Starred icon on the email until you find the one you want. They will rotate in the order their shown in your settings and you can drag and drop the stars to change the order if there’s one you want to use more than others.

Archive & Delete

To Archive an email in Gmail is to simply remove all labels for that email. It won’t be shown in the Inbox or under any other labels.

Once an email has been Archived it can only be found by searching for it, or you can find it in the list by enabling the All Mail label.

In the top right, click Settings > Settings.
Click the Labels tab.
Scroll to the Labels section, locate All Mail and click Show.

Select the All Mail label in the main Gmail window and it will show every email that hasn’t been deleted. If you want to move an email out of the Archive, locate it, right click on it and click Move to Inbox.

If the Archive system doesn’t fit in with your style of work, it might be best to create your own Archive label and use that instead.

Deleted email move to the Trash label and will be permanently deleted after 30 days.

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