Social and Promotion Tabs in Gmail

If you use Gmail for sending and receiving emails, you will have noticed that as well as your inbox, there are two other tabs that are displayed by default. The Social and Promotion tabs.

Social and promotions tabs highlighted in gmail's inbox.

Gmail uses these tabs to try and filter out emails that it thinks are related to social media notifications and possible spam/sales promotions. This in turn should make your inbox less cluttered and only contains emails that are important to you.

This can be a blessing when it works well but also a bit of a curse when an important email is placed there by mistake and you miss it or even delete it by mistake.

Inbox Settings

You can change the settings for how your inbox is displayed and this post is going to show you how.

From your gmail inbox, click on the settings icon which looks like a cog in the top right-hand corner of the browser window.

Gmail settings icon.

The settings pane will open on the right-hand side of the browser window.

Gmail settings pane

Scroll down the settings until you see an area that is titled “Inbox type”.

Gmail settings inbox type heading.

By clicking on one of the radio buttons in this area, you can change the way that Gmail displays your inbox emails so that:

All important emails are displayed first followed by everything else

Gmail inbox important emails first.

All unread emails are displayed first followed by everything else

Gmail inbox unread emails first.

All starred emails are displayed first followed by everything else

Gmail inbox starred emails first.

All important and unread emails are displayed first, followed by starred emails, followed by everything else.

Gmail inbox priority inbox.

The default inbox type is the setting that shows the three tabs that you see normally

Gmail inbox default inbox type.

and this is the setting that we need to change. With the default radio button chosen, click on the text “Customise”.

Gmail inbox customise default link.

A window will open showing the different tabs that are available.

Gmail default tabs window.

Click on the tick boxes on the left-hand side of this window to change which tabs you want to be visible for your inbox.

Gmail default tabs tickboxes.

When you are happy with your changes, click on the “Save” button to close the window.

Select tabs window with save button highlighted.

You will now see changes in the inbox that match the settings tick boxes that were chosen. In this example the social and promotions tabs have been removed and all emails are displayed in one list.

Gmail inbox with changed tabs.
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