If you are always on the go, the Gmail app is probably among the most used apps on yourAndroid phone. It makes managing your inbox easy and keeps you informed of all high-priority emails that arrive. But Gmail’s Android app is not perfect. There are a few settings that you can tweak for a better experience. This will help speed up your workflow, ensure you are notified of all incoming emails, prevent you from accidentally deleting important emails, and more.
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1Turn off the unhelpful Meet tab
No more Meet-ings
If you don’t use Meet for scheduling calls, you will find its dedicated tab in the Gmail app annoying. As someone who rarely uses Meet, I don’t need its tab to occupy precious real estate in my email app. Thankfully, you can easily get rid of the Meet tab from the Gmail app. Even better, you can disable the Meet tab on a per-account basis. So, you can hide it from your personal inbox while keeping it for your work mail account for quick access to your scheduled calls.
The Gmail app will automatically restart with the Meet tab hidden.
2Change the default notification action button
The beauty of Android’s notification system is that you can directly take action on notifications. With action buttons in Gmail notifications, you can directly archive an email or reply to it. The archive button is useful as it can help you reach the magical inbox zero figure and keep things organized. But what if you frequently trash emails instead of archiving them? You can dive into the Gmail app’s settings to change the default notification action.
Instead of Archive, you will get an action button to delete emails from your phone’s notification shade. Sadly, you set any other action for the notification action button. The Delete button is also non-customizable.
3Tweak swipe actions to your liking
You can swipe left or right on emails in your inbox from the Gmail app to delete or archive them. This is an excellent feature as it lets you quickly take different actions on various emails in your inbox. Even better, you can customize the swipe actions to your liking and requirements to speed up your workflow.
4Get notifications for every email
Because all emails are important
By default, the Gmail app for Android only notifies you of high-priority emails. This ensures you are not bothered by notifications from unwanted emails. But in some scenarios, you might want to be notified of all emails that hit your inbox, even when you are on mobile. To do this, you must dive into the Gmail app settings and change its notification settings.
The Gmail app lets you set notification preferences on a per-account basis. Thus, you can ensure you are notified of emails that land in your work account while only getting notifications for important emails in your personal inbox.
5Enable action confirmation
There have been instances where I accidentally tapped the send button in Gmail’s Android app while replying to an email. This becomes an even bigger issue when you realize that you cannot revoke a sent email within a few seconds of sending it, like on the web. It’s the same with archiving or deleting an email. One accidental tap can lead you to delete or archive an important email.
To prevent this, you’re able to enable action confirmation in Gmail’s Android app. This ensures that you need to confirm your action when deleting, archiving, or sending an email.
6Change Gmail’s sync settings
By default, the Gmail app for Android syncs and stores emails for the last 30 days. This is good enough for most users. But if you frequently find yourself without internet access and unable to access important emails from over a month ago, you’re able to change Gmail’s sync settings to avoid this from happening.
Based on your settings and preferences, the Gmail app will download the emails locally onto your phone for quick access even without the internet.
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Stay on top of your inbox
Changing the above settings in Gmail’s Android app will make it easy for you to tame the chaos in your inbox. Besides the above settings, Gmail for Android packs several useful features, including the ability toschedule emails. You should also learnhow to reduce spam emailsto keep unwanted clutter away from your Gmail account.
