Over the years, my inbox used to get flooded with emails from clients, employees, the different software I use, and practice management software, and it just got way too much. I thought there must be a better way to organise my inbox in Gmail. So I set out to find out how to categorise emails in Gmail.
Some of the benefits was I wasn't having to go and press that older button for 100s of pages, and when clients came back to me, I could easily look in the right Gmail folder and see all the details and history of the SEO coaching. I am now happy to say that once I categorised my emails in gmail that, I am down to 0 unread emails.
Here is an image of what my account used to look like before I organised my emails in Gmail. It was horrific, and I needed to sort my emails fast. Once I knew how to do this, whenever I gained a new client or partners this took me 60 seconds to automate my Gmail.
I am going to make this as easy and painless as I can to organise your Gmail into the correct folders so you can have a clean inbox.
The first thing you have to do is to create a label in Gmail. Now labels are used to categorise your inbox. These are some examples of how to categorise emails in Gmail:
So what I do when organising my folders within Gmail is to head over to the bottom left in your Gmail, and you should see the section labels.
Press the + arrow and create the label
You will see the option to input a new label name. There is also an option to "nest label under". Think of these as a parent label and then subcategories. Examples of when I am organising my Gmail inbox are:
Client as the parent and then client 1 and client 2 as the subcategories. Once happy, hit create.
From there, you will see the new category on the bottom left of your Gmail. To make it easier to read, I also colour code it. To do that, hover over your category label until you see the 3 dots.
Press it, and at the top of the list you should see Choose colour. I tend to colour code my different folders in Gmail different colours based on how urgent I think they are.
So that is the foundation of how to categorise emails in Gmail. Next, we are going to start setting up some automations for future emails and also a quick way to categorise old emails.
Now we're getting on to the fun bit of how to categorise emails in Gmail. I am going to show you how to create rules in Gmail to move emails to folders, not just label your emails. This is how I cleaned up my inbox and went from thousands of emails to 0 emails sitting there, with my day structured.
So the next step is to go to the search bar at the top. Now, in this example, we are going to think of a client. Let's say their domain/ email address is louis@gmail.com, but they also have other people in the organisation with different names. I want to categorise all their emails into one folder as they are one client (one project for me)
We want to type the end of their email into the search bar. Do not stop there or hit search. On the right hand side, click "show search options" its that icon the image on the right hand side of the search bar.
This more advanced image should show. Press the Create filter button. This is the magic button to create filters in Gmail.
From there, go down a bit with the options and find the "Apply the label". Find the label you want to use. In this case, I am going to make it a subcategory, as my master category is full of all my clients
Now something I like to do with cleaning my inbox and categorising emails in Gmail is tick the skip the inbox (archive it) button. What it does is take it out of the inbox and put its into the label/ category section you have specified. This means you dont have 2 emails, one in the inbox and one in the label.
Next up is the next magic part on how to categorise emails in Gmail: tick the "Also apply filter to (number)Â matching conversations". In my examples below, I have 38 emails, and what this does is run the rules on the existing emails that haven't gone into the label yet and put those emails in there. You will start to notice your inbox getting lower and lower.
However, don't forget to hit that button to create a filter for everything to start working.
Now I am going to pause here as there were quite a few other filter options that you could have also done.
I will go into more details about the extra Gmail filters you can use with some real examples so you can understand how they categorise your Gmail better:
As mentioned above, this is to skip the inbox folder to clear that folder and go straight into the label area. An example is clients emailing in.
I use this for non-urgent emails that don't need to distract me. It could be a supplier receipt that confirms I have paid a bill, and it's just there for record-keeping.
I use this for my most important emails. It could be the main contact from one of my SEO consulting clients, or I have made a filter for any email from them that has the words "Urgent" in the subject line.
As mentioned above, these are the default labels I am applying to my emails and use it for clients, suppliers, technology, accountant, payroll, etc. This is the foundation for how to categorise emails in Gmail.
I love this option. I use this for my accountant. When I get receipts, I forward them on to them so they have a record. I also use it for client emails; if they email me and forget to cc my staff, I automatically send the email to my employees.
This one is a tough one, as I like to see most emails. I have had friends use this for spam emails. For example, if the subject line says "I noticed your business does xyz". You have to be very careful, though, as you don't want an important email deleted.
This is one where you have to know your inbox a bit. Sometimes your suppliers may send an email to you, and it automatically goes to spam. So what this does is automatically whitelist it and makes sure it doesn't go to spam if you use this filter on their emails.
This is an interesting one and very similar to the star filter; however, star is more for my clients and important is used for potential clients. So it could be request a call or request a quote in the subject line, and I want to put it into a special label to get back to this asap.
Another interesting filter on how to categorise emails in Gmail. The use case could be industry updates. I like to stay in touch with SEO trends, but I don't want it to fill my inbox up.
So you may realise your Gmail looks a bit like this by default. You have Primary on the left, Promotion next and then Social. The system by default tries to categorise your emails into these sections to help you manage your inbox.
For instance, all my Instagram and Facebook emails go into social. So I know it's there, and I don't really need to move them elsewhere. However, you might use Twitter, and it might go into your inbox every now and again. You might want to use categories to make sure it stays in the social media area.
As mentioned, this is the golden ticket on how to categorise emails in Gmail from the past. So you want to run the rule on those emails that happened from the past to now to really clear up your Gmail inbox.
So I hope you like my guide on how to categorise emails in Gmail. If you have any more use cases or need a hand with filtering, feel free to drop a comment in the box below.
I thought it could be done by doing similar steps, but it's not.
The fastest way is to follow the steps above to find the emails you want to categorise, then use the filters to label them, and then the magic button: apply filter to matching conversations that hopefully comes up with many you can bulk organise.
Gmail has labels that act as folders. Why they don't call it folders, I don't know, as they are essentially able to make folders and subfolders, but they call it labels. They do also have categories, but I think that's kind of moving away from folders. If you are looking for how to categorise emails in Gmail, use the label function mostly.
AI tools are becoming part of everyday business quickly. You might already be using ChatGPT to help draft an email, come up with content ideas or answer a question but if you use Google, Gmail, Docs or Drive every day, there’s another AI tool you’re probably going to start seeing a lot more. Google Gemini. […]
Firstly, watermarking isn't just a Google thing When you generate an image using Google's Nano Banana model in Gemini, you'll have noticed the small sparkle watermark that gets added to the corner. Up until recently, there was no way to turn it off. That's changed. Watermarking on AI generated content isn't something exclusive to Google […]
Creating original images for every page of your website takes time, effort and money. That is why so many businesses use stock photography and AI-generated images. They’re fast, affordable and make getting a website or blog post live easier. Do stock photos hurt SEO? And do AI images impact SEO? Stock photos and AI images […]
