You might have not heard about gmail’s new tabbed layout yet. Gmail has introduced this feature very silently and the feature is completely optional, based on user’s own choice and preference.

What is it all about?

The new tabbed layout is introduced both for mobiles and desktop at the same time. The sole motive of this feature is to provide a sleek and more manageable cum categorized view to the inbox. Earlier, all the incoming mails used to fall together in the same place and it was very tiring to find out the important ones between all of them. Gmail has taken the issue in the consideration and the users are now able to auto-categorize their mails into Primary mails, Social, Promotional Mails, Forums and Updates. Not every mail will fall together in inbox now.

These tabs are nothing but a category, which you can choose for all your mails, individually. The roles/significance of pre-defined tabs is as follows:

Primary: person-to-person conversations and messages that don’t appear in other tabs

Social: messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, and other social websites

Promotions: deals, offers, and other marketing emails

Updates: auto-alert, personal, auto-generated updates including confirmations, bills, receipts, bills, and statements

Forums: messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists

You can choose to show starred mails in Primary group as per your preference.

You can also choose a particular tab for further incoming mails while creating a filter. Gmail has also enabled drag and drop feature to put a mail in a different tab.

How to Enable?

To enable these feature for your inbox, you have to login to your gmail account, click on gear (settings) icon on right hand side. The drop down appears, choose the option “Configure Inbox” and then select the tabs you would like to see. That’s it.

What was the need?

Before this tab feature, the mails in our gmail inbox could be organized via folders and labels only, and that feature is still on along with tabs (this is pretty confusing, isn’t it?). Via folders and labels you can assign a particular pre-defined label to your mails and can also view all mails falling in same label or folder just by clicking to label/folder in the sidebar. But earlier there was no auto-categorizing for mails, user can create filters to assign a label to all the incoming mails automatically but that too involves a manual process and wasn’t that effective.

What ‘More’ could be done?

In my opinion, the tabbed feature is a wonderful gesture by Gmail. I never liked all my mails falling at same place, as it becomes very cumbersome to sort out the important ones. But Gmail should reduce the confusion and heavily-cluttered options for better accessibility. There has to be a crystal clear way to access tabs and labels parallel, or may be if they could be accessed together.

As of now, there is no option to create custom tabs. We have to choose one of just 5 pre-defined tabs for assigning. Few of my primary mails are getting dropped into “updates” tab and it is very tiring to keep checking the tab where new email is arriving, just for confirmation.

Try to understand Gmail’s starred mails, Priority Inbox, Smart Labels, Folders, Categories/Tabs and filters all together can be as annoying as finding a needle in the haystack. Be sure before trying your hands on this new feature or else it can create mess too. If you don’t like this tabbed layout, you can switch back to default view from inbox settings.