Tips that will help you get started with Gmail
Add or remove inbox categories and tabs in Gmail:
Sort your emails into different inbox tabs, like Social or Promotions. When you open Gmail, you won't have to see all emails at once.
Add or remove category tabs
Move an email to a new category
1. Drag an email to a category tab to add it.
2. To move all future emails from that sender to that category, on the bottom left pop-up notification, click Yes.
Change email notifications
You can turn on notifications to get alerts on your phone or computer when you get new emails.
Turn notifications on or off
You can get email notifications on Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari when you're signed in to Gmail and have it open in your browser.
Note: You won't see any notifications if you turned off all notifications for your browser.
On your computer, open Gmail.
In the top right, click Settings Settings and then See all settings.
Scroll down to the "Desktop notifications" section.
Select New mail notifications on, Important mail notifications on, or Mail notifications off.
At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
Note: If you use inbox categories and turned on notifications for new mail, you'll only get notifications about messages in your Primary category. If you turned on notifications for important mail, you'll get notifications for everything marked as important.
Can't turn on inbox categories
If you have more than 250,000 messages in your inbox, you won't be able to turn on inbox categories.
To get below this limit, you can archive or delete messages.
Check the number of messages in your inbox
In Gmail, replies to a message are grouped into conversations. In your inbox, you'll see the number of conversations you have, but not messages.
Follow these steps to see how many messages are in your inbox:
On your computer, open Gmail. You can't find your total number of messages from the Gmail app.
At the top right, click Settings Settings and then Settings.
Scroll down to the "Conversation view" section.
Select Conversation view off.
At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
Go back to your inbox to see the number of messages you have. If you have multiple sections or categories, make sure to add together the number from each section.
When you're done, go back to settings and turn on "Conversation view."