I
have found a quick and simple way to organize Gmail's Priority Inbox to have special sections
showing only unread messages organized by label. Now mine looks like this:
Now
I have an easy, minimal and efficient way to manage my different accounts from
one screen.
How
this works is that I have separate accounts for work, school and personal
email. Both my work and school accounts automatically forward to my personal
email, so that I only have to check one inbox.
Before
this hack, my inbox was a cluttered
mess, my work and school emails were mixed in with promotions and mailing lists
and my other personal emails. This was a nightmare, because I tend to use my
inbox as a sort of "to-do list," with my unperformed tasks staying
unread. I don't need to see my promotional and personal messages mixed up with
my work and school mail.
My
forwarded messages are automatically labeled and "archived" so that
they do not show up in my main inbox. I then set up the priority inbox to
display a section that has the label. The problem is that in this view, both read
and unread messages are displayed in the order they are received. This is messy
and very unorganized, if I leave a message unread, which I typically do if I
need to get to it later, new read messages will stack on top.
But
now, with this hack discovered by Ben at stackexchange.com, only unread
messages are shown in the inbox, allowing me quickly see my priority messages.
The hack involves using Chrome's built in Developer Tools to apply additional
filters to the sections.
After
your labels and priority in-boxes have been set up, apply a filter to
"archive" the labels, so they won't show up in your main inbox.
Next,
use Chrome's "Inspect Element" (right click or ctrl+shift+c) to
change the code in Gmail's settings to have the sections show all unread
messages in the section.
Here are Ben's steps to set it up:
1. Go to the priority inbox settings tab.
2. Click the options next to the section you want to show your work mail.
3. Click "More Options..."
4. Inspect the element for the "Work" Label
5. You will notice on the surrounding div there is an attribute cfg="^all,Work", change the value to "^u,^all,Work"
6. Select the label on the page as you normally would
Here
are some screenshots to help with the setup process:
Inspect
the element by right clicking the label after clicking "More
Options…"
Here
is where you will edit the code:
Here is Ben's list of alternative commands you can use. You can chain commands together with a comma.
^i = Inbox
^u = Unread
^io_im = Important
^t = starred
^f = sent
^r = drafts
^all = All mail (include archive)
ie. ^i,^u,Work = all emails in your inbox, that are unread with the label "Work".
To
set the inbox up the way we want it, we need to display "all" and
"unread" if you only display unread (^u), the messages will not show
in the section because they have been "archived". We want to have
"^u,^all,Work" in the quotes after cfg=. Replace "Work"
with whatever label you are using for that section. For my School label, I had
cfg= "^u,^all,Work".
After
following these steps, and clicking on the label to apply it to the section,
you will immediately know that it is working because the section will display
Unread,Work for the section, as shown below:
The
best part is that after you apply these settings, your inbox will be the same
in all of your browsers! No plug-ins required!
