Add or remove inbox categories & 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

  1. On your computer, open Gmail.
  2. At the top right, click Settings   See all settings.
  3. Click the Inbox tab.
  4. In the "Inbox type" section, select Default. Note: To hide all tabs, select another inbox type.
  5. In the "Categories" section, check the boxes of tabs you want to show. Note: You can't make new tabs; you can only show or hide existing ones.
  6. Scroll to the bottom, then click Save Changes.

Tip: If you've turned on notifications, you'll only get notifications about emails in your Primary category.

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.  


Find emails in a category

Can't find emails in a category


Search a category


Turn promotion bundling off

If you use the Default inbox type, Gmail bundles promotional emails under the Promotions tab.

Turn this setting off:

  1. Open Gmail.
  2. In the top right, click Settings   See all settings. 
  3. Click Inbox  untick "Enable bundling of top promo emails in Promotions."

Learn more about how Gmail ads work.

Change notifications for each category

You can choose different notifications for each category. Learn more about notifications.

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:

  1. On your computer, open Gmail. You can't find your total number of messages from the Gmail app.
  2. In the top right, click Settings   Settings.
  3. Scroll down to the "Conversation view" section.
  4. Select Conversation view off.
  5. At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
  6. 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.
  7. When you're done, go back to settings and turn on "Conversation view."

I 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.