Organize & Search Gmail

Prioritize your emails

If your inbox fills up quickly throughout the day, you can enable a setting called Priority Inbox to help you organize your emails. When you enable the Priority Inbox setting, Gmail automatically splits your inbox into three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else. 

Gmail will notice your complex email habits — the emails you open, mark as important, delete, label, and star — and prioritize those conversations at the top of your inbox. 

For example, Priority Inbox will recognize that your teacher sends emails that are significant to you, categorize them under Important and unread, and give you the option to mark a message with a star after reading it so that you are reminded to return to it.

Try it out

Here's an overview of the Priority Inbox:

1. Click the Settings icon, then click See all settings. 

2. Click the Inbox tab. In the Inbox type dropdown menu, select Priority Inbox.

Note: By default Priority Inbox separates important emails into 3 sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else.

3. To select which emails you want to prioritize, select the drop down menu and choose Priority inbox. 

4. This is the section to focus on when defining your priority sections. Look through the options listed here and configure your Inbox to work for you.

5. When you are finished updating your settings, click the Save Changes button at the bottom.

Highlight important emails

When sending an urgent or time-sensitive email message, you can let recipients know a message needs their attention. Just add an appropriate heading to the subject of your message to highlight your request.

To avoid missing important incoming messages, set up a filter and automatically apply a label to your messages. Labels are custom tags that help to categorize conversations so you can find and organize emails easily. 

With labels in Gmail, you have the flexibility to categorize your emails however you want.

You can use labels to:

1. Track the status of your projects. For example, create the labels "Science: In Progress" and "Math: Done" to indicate projects and assignments you are working on or have completed.

2. Organize email by nesting labels like subfolders. For example, create the label "Tasks" and under this label, create nested labels by subject or course name.

3. Identify email that needs a response.

4. Identify email that can be read later.

When you get an email from someone, its importance is indicated with a label (yellow marker) next to the sender’s name. You can manually add yellow markers, but Gmail also tries to predict what is important and add them automatically for you. You can also apply several labels to an email, then later find the email by clicking any of its labels from the left panel. You can also search by label.

Try it out

Highlight important emails in your inbox by following these steps:

Practice creating a label in Gmail to automatically categorize incoming messages.

1. From an email, click Labels and Create new.

2. Enter the label name.

3. Click Create.

Star important messages

Another way you can organize your inbox is by marking emails as Starred so you can return to them and respond later. For example, you might receive an important message during the school day that you can’t respond to until later. Mark important emails as Starred to make them easier to find later.

Try it out

Star important emails in your inbox.

1. Click the Starred icon on the left of each message in your inbox.

2. To see all your starred emails, in the left sidebar, click Starred. 

Search your inbox

If you need to search for a specific email in your inbox, Gmail has a search function to help you. Whether emails have a label, filter, or star, the search feature in Gmail allows you to find any message you’ve ever received. You can search Gmail for conversations based on sender, content, time, and attachment using the search bar at the top of your inbox. 

This is helpful if you forget to add a label or mark an email as starred or if you need to find an email you didn’t think you would need later. For example, if a teacher says they emailed you regarding an assignment or document, but you don’t remember seeing it, you could simply search their name or email address to find it. 

Try it out

Search your inbox using search criteria in the search box.

Open Gmail.

1. At the top, in the search box, enter your search criteria.

   • Type in a person’s name, email address, a subject line, or any keyword you can think of that would help identify the email you are looking for. 

   • When you search in the From field using a specific email address, the results also return Drive files shared by that email address.

Click Search.