[HowTo] Cleanup cluttered Gmail labels

Gmail is favorite email service for many of us, The user interface is simple and powerful . There are bunch of services which Gmail provide and the other email services don’t.  Gmail labeling or filtering is a very useful feature using which you can easily handle the incoming mails and segregate into different folders or the labels. When you have large number of incoming emails this feature comes comes handy.

Creating labels in Gmail is really simple. We have explained it in this tutorial, have look into the same.

When you create labels according to your preferences, over a period of time these labels may get cluttered. If you want to clean them up, you have to go though all the filter settings and see which of the labels can be removed or merged.

Here are few steps using which you can handle Gmail labels properly.

Hide unwanted labels

You might have created many such labels where you hardly see any incoming email. In such cases you can choose to delete the label, or hide it . Just click on the icon in front of the label, you will get many options as shown below.

Show label only if there are new mails

You might have created labels where emails come in occasionally, So is the reason you do not want to delete the label. You can choose label to show up only if there are new mails . Just choose “Show if unread” option.

Hide the labels

You can choose to hide labels completely. The hidden labels are shown only if you click on “More” in the Gmail inbox, left sidebar.

Handling mails in Inbox

Many of us monitor emails via our android device or even in web. We also make sure that there are no unread mails in your Inbox. In may cases, we may miss to read some mails and if you want to know which mail was left unread, it is difficult.

So, click on the drop down that is present in front of the Gmail inbox text, You will find the following options.

So, selecting “Unread first” would split the Gmail inbox into two halves. Upper half will display only the unread mails. Once you read them, the mail moves to lower half. All the other options shown are pretty much self explanatory.