Using Gmail Options to Keep Your Inbox Spam-Free
If you are using a Gmail address, one of the nicest features that Google provides is "inbox tabs".
The main benefit of inbox tabs is to filter your inbox so you see your most important and personalized messages, but customize things so that certain business messages or notifications don't get lost in the junk list either.
Tabs are used to separate individual-specific email messages from various types of group messages, mass mailings, automatic notifications and plain old junk mail - a.k.a. spam.
This is a feature that I can help set up for users with some ease.
But for those of you who feel comfortable customizing your own settings, I'll offer some "do it yourself" tips for your reference below:
Gmail inbox tabs may or may not be activated currently in your Gmail inbox display. If not, they can be activated by clicking on the gear-shaped icon in the top right area of your inbox message list screen. Click on that icon and you'll get a pop-up screen entitled "Select tabs to enable".
The tabs available to enable are
Primary
Social
Promotions
Updates
Forums
Each can be activated by clicking to put a check mark in the box to the left of the Tab name, and then clicking to Save the change.
Once you've done that, your inbox will open to the Primary message list, and the other activated tabs will appear as column headers to the right.
When you click on a different tab heading, the screen will display a list of messages belonging to that tab.
Primary - This is where we get most of the messages we want to give personal attention. Primary includes individualized messages - those coming specifically to you from email addresses listed in your contacts.
(It also included messages you've assigned to be Primary, or that you have "starred" if you elect to tag those as primary.)
Social - These are messages coming from "social networking" websites that you might be using - Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest for example. Computer users subscribing to dating sites will find messages that come from those member sites in the Social tab listing as well.
Promotions - These are commercial and promotional messages from businesses with which we have registered as users, such as the Microsoft Store or Amazon.
Updates - These messages are the Notifications or Alerts that you receive from businesses. They may include bank or insurance notifications, which typically we don't want to miss.
They also may include notifications from social networks or other websites that concern the business side of one's registration with the website - as opposed to the purposeful usage or personal content of the site.
Forums - These emails come from online groups, discussion forums and mailing lists. Forums are not commonly used by most home computer users, but for hobbyists or online club exchanges they can be important.
Most of us are most interested in the messages that automatically get assigned to the Primary category. We like the idea of separating out other messages. But we don't want to miss important messages such as may come in from certain businesses, especially accounts information from financial institutions that fall into the Updates category.
Fortunately, we can assign email from specific senders to go into Primary automatically.
If your bank or insurance company messages appear in "Updates" for example, you can use your mouse cursor to drag the message title over into the Primary category - then once you've done so, those messages should appear into your Primary inbox area automatically, not to be missed.
Note that if you are using a non-Gmail address, such as Roadrunner, Embarqmail, Earthlink, Yahoo, AOL or so on, there are filtering features to separate out junk email using desktop email software. Most of the webmail services other than Gmail do not offer anything close to what Gmail inbox tabs will do however.
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