Gmail Tips: How to have the perfect inbox?

Well, it is an undeniable fact that we get a tons of emails every day from everywhere and most of the time we are lost in our inbox. To search for a specific e-mail, subject thread, sender, or a particular attachment becomes torture and a waste-of-time mostly. Did you know you can have the “perfect clear inbox” with Gmail features for free? Let me briefly tell you what you can do in 10 minutes to configure your inbox and make life way easier!

I assume you all use Gmail, so let’s skip how to create a Gmail account and focus directly on the Inbox problem. First things first: Labeling and filtering. The first thing you immediately need to have are “labels”. You can create labels by clicking on label icon above the e-mail itself. Name the label according to your customer names or groups under which you want to collect your emails with a common sender or subject.

I always use the company names I work with. You can give labels colors by clicking on them — you will see all your labels at the left of your inbox under the COMPOSE sign. Of course, this is just the beginning. Now you need to create filters. Filters are going to allocate everything in the right place and will clean-up your inbox like a magical wand in few seconds! There are several ways to create a filter, but I will let you know the easiest one. Just click on the “more” arrow on your e-mail and open the filter configuration panel.

In the configuration panel you will fill the “from”, “to”, “has-the-words”, and etc. boxes to choose the specific emails you want to select every time they drop into your inbox, and then create the filter. My favorite part is right here : You have amazing options that gives you the ability to organize your inbox in this section. You can select options like “apply the label”, “skip the inbox”, “forward it” and etc. and set basically a “rule” that will recur every time an e-mail drops in this particular filter you have created. Don’t forget to select every time ‘Apply filters to matching conversations’ option, otherwise the changes you made will not affect the e-mails in your current inbox.

This way, every time you receive a message from a particular sender, or when you send a message to a particular receiver, to a specific group with a specific subject then it will automatically be “labeled” and you will see them in your inbox already organized even before you read them!

After filtering and labeling, there is one step left for you to do , to be considered as a “efficient” Gmail user :) To know how to search. Yes, to actually know “how to search thorough inbox” is more than a skill, it is a specialty. It will be the life and time-saver by all means. Gmail has it’s own language and it helps you so much to get what you look for immediately. Try to write commands like [in:sent to:john@gmail.com “December Report” ] . This means “Hey Google, show me the e-mails that I have sent to John that has the exact words December Report in it.” Or let’s try this: [to:Alice@gmail.com from:me has:attachment], then I will get the e-mails I have sent to Alice where I have shared a document that I have been looking for a week!

Here I have mentioned few of Quick Gmail Tips which can give you the perfect Inbox experience which I am sure will help you in your daily e-mail communication struggle! Stay tuned as always to learn more of how to make life easier…