You might not know it from looking, but Gmail is jam-packed with time-saving tricks.

Some of ’em are right there in front of your face, if you know how to find ’em — while others require a teensy bit of under-the-hood tinkering to activate. But all of ’em are built right into Gmail and have the potential to make managing your email a heck of a lot easier.

Check out these 16 splendid Gmail tips and get ready to master your inbox once and for all.

(Note that unless otherwise specified, these tips are specific to Gmail’s web-based desktop version.)

Inbox step-savers

1. You can actually view attachments right from your Gmail inbox. Provided you haven’t switched away from the service’s “default” interface arrangement, you’ll see small tiles for every file associated with an email right below the message’s subject line. And you can click on any of those tiles to open or preview the file’s contents and get directly to the info you need.

2. It’s easy to miss, but take note: When you hover your mouse over a message in your inbox, Gmail gives you a series of quick-access actions at the far-right side of the line. You can archive the email, delete it, mark it as read or unread, snooze it, or even RSVP to a meeting request right then and there — without ever having to open the message.

3. A super-useful keyboard shortcut I always forget to use: While viewing a multi-email thread of messages — a conversation in which you have numerous back-and-forth replies under the same subject — hit the semicolon key (;) to expand the entire conversation and show every message in the thread. And then hit the colon key (:) to collapse it back down so you see only the most recent email.

Just make sure you enable keyboard shortcuts first, if you haven’t already: Click the gear icon in the website’s upper-right corner, then click “See all settings” and look for the “Keyboard shortcuts” option midway down the screen that comes up. Select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” setting and then be sure to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.

4. Some of Gmail’s best keyboard shortcuts are the ones you create yourself. Go back into the website’s settings and this time, click the Advanced tab. See the line labeled “Custom keyboard shortcuts”? Click “Enable” next to that, then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.

Once Gmail refreshes itself to apply the changes, go back to the Settings area again and look for the newly present Keyboard Shortcuts tab. There, you can adjust any of the default keyboard settings to make them simpler to activate or easier to remember.

One of my favorite adjustments, for instance — and one I rely on constantly — is adding in a second command for the “Go to inbox” shortcut, which is typically gi by default. In Google’s old Inbox service, that shortcut was simplified down to just i, and once you get used to that shorter sequence, you won’t want to go back.

5. The panel at the right of Gmail’s web interface lets you pull up Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Tasks, or Google Contacts right inside your inbox so you can manage info from each of those apps without having to switch tabs or open anything new. And here’s a handy hidden trick: With Tasks, you can drag messages directly from your inbox into the panel to create new tasks around them.

Unfortunately — and somewhat strangely — the same drag-and-drop behavior isn’t currently possible with Calendar or Keep, nor is it possible for Contacts.

6. Even with a miniature version of Contacts being available inside that handy side panel, you might sometimes want to pull up the full Google Contacts website for its complete set of features. Provided you’ve got Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts enabled now, commit this workaround to memory: Pressing g and then c will open up Contacts in a separate tab, no matter what else you’re doing in your inbox.

Composing shortcuts

Editor’s note: Assuming you’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts (see tip 3), the following keyboard shortcuts work in any browser on any desktop operating system. Mac users, just swap in the ⌘ key for “Ctrl” wherever you see it.

7. Ever like marking messages as unread after you’ve opened ’em? Gmail makes that incredibly easy to do: Anytime you have an email open, look for the envelope icon directly to the right of the trash can in the horizontal row of icons above your message (in the area directly beneath the search bar). That’ll let you mark the message as unread with a single click. Or, for a faster and more powerful one-two punch, just type an underscore (_) while viewing any message. That’ll mark it as unread and zap you back to your main inbox.

8. Speaking of combining multiple actions into a single command, simplify your inbox organization process by enabling Gmail’s convenient Send & Archive button. It places a second button alongside the regular Send button whenever you’re responding to an existing message, and clicking that button (or, even better yet, hitting Ctrl-Enter on your keyboard) will send your response and archive the thread in one fell swoop.

To enable it, look for the “Send and Archive” option within the General tab of Gmail’s settings. Click “Show ‘Send & Archive’ button in reply,” hit the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen, and then get ready to save yourself steps the next time you type a reply.

9. I don’t know about you, but I frequently start typing an email and then decide against sending it. (Rather fittingly, I started typing out a lengthy explanation of the reasons but then decided against including it.) If the same thing ever happens to you, remember this: Hitting Ctrl-Shift-D while you’re in the Gmail compose tool will close the compose window and discard your draft. And it works whether you’re writing a new email or a reply.

10. Another awesome time-saver: In addition to the obvious Ctrl-B for bold and Ctrl-I for italics email formatting shortcuts, Gmail has hotkeys for doing some advanced forms of text formatting — things that’d otherwise require multiple clicks and much menu-hunting to accomplish.

The ones I use the most:

• Ctrl-Shift-8 will add a bulleted list into your email (just like this list!), and Ctrl-Shift-7 will add a numbered one.
• Ctrl-Shift-9 will offset text in a blockquote style.
• Ctrl-] will indent text, while Ctrl-[ will remove any indentation.
• And Ctrl-\ will remove any formatting on your selected text and make it as plain as can be.

11. You’d never know it, but the Gmail compose tool itself can take on various forms, depending on your preferences. Make a mental note of these possibilities and the shortcuts to get to ’em:

• To start a new message in the default lower-right-corner-of-the-screen window view, hit c.
• To start a new message in a pop-up window totally separate from your main Gmail tab, hit Shift-C. You can do the same thing for a reply by hitting Shift-R while viewing a message thread — or Shift-A for reply-all.
• To start a new message in a full-screen compose window within your main Gmail tab, hit c — then click the little arrow icon in the compose tool’s upper-right corner. (You can also hit Shift while clicking that icon to pop the message out into a separate pop-up window form.)
• If you’d rather use that full-screen compose window all the time, by default, click the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right corner of the compose tool and look for the “Default to full-screen” option there. (If you ever change your mind, you’ll find the option to disable that preference in that very same spot.)
• If for some reason you like the idea of composing a message in a new tab instead of a pop-up window or within the main Gmail tab, just hit d while in your inbox. That’ll do the trick!

To see more keyboard shortcuts, just type ? while viewing any message list within Gmail.

Smarter snoozing

12. Don’t forget to take advantage of Gmail’s super-handy snoozing tool: Instead of letting messages linger in your inbox and pile up to an unmanageable point, use the snooze function to help yourself deal with everything as soon as you see it.

A good rule of thumb to maintain: If you can respond to something in less than a minute, do it. If something doesn’t require any action on your behalf, archive it immediately. And if something requires some sort of action but you don’t have the time to mess with it at that moment, snooze it to a day and time when you will be able to handle it.

You can snooze an email from your inbox by hovering over the message and selecting the clock-shaped Snooze icon, as noted in tip 2. You can also snooze an email while it’s open by clicking the three-dot menu icon to the right of the folder symbol directly above the email and then clicking “Snooze” within the menu that pops up. Or you can simply press b while you’re viewing a message or while you have it selected in your inbox.

13. Gmail even makes it possible to snooze multiple messages at the same time — in case you see more than one email that needs to be pushed back to the same point. From your inbox, simply click the boxes to the left of any messages you want to include, then click the three-dot menu icon within the row of icons toward the top of the screen and select “Snooze” from there.

14. Need to get back to something you snoozed — or change the day and time at which it’s set to reappear? You can always find all of your snoozed emails in Gmail’s Snoozed section, located beneath the “Inbox” line in the left-hand panel. Once you’re there, just hover over any email and click the clock-shaped icon to change its snooze settings or unsnooze it entirely.

15. You can snooze messages from the Gmail mobile apps, too, though the option is a bit buried. From the inbox view, press and hold a message to select it, then tap the three-dot menu icon at the top of the screen and look for “Snooze” in the list of options that appears. If you’ve already opened the message, tap the three-dot menu icon at the top of that screen; you should see “Snooze” show up as part of the options there as well.

16. Make snoozing even simpler in the Gmail mobile app by assigning it to one of your inbox swipe actions. Just open up the app, tap the three-line menu icon in its upper-left corner, then select “Settings.” On Android, tap “General settings” followed by “Swipe actions”; on iOS, you’ll tap “Inbox customizations” and then “Mail swipe actions.”

All that’s left is to set either your left swipe or right swipe to “Snooze,” and then, you can simply swipe any message in that direction from your inbox to snooze it — no wasted taps or menu diving required. (The Gmail Android app has several other similarly useful hidden features, by the way, most of which aren’t available on iOS.)

And with that, your Gmail time-saving toolbox is officially complete! The next logical step in your inbox improvement adventure is mastering the art of Gmail labels to fight back against email chaos — and I’ve got just the guide to get you started.

This story was originally published in May 2018 and most recently updated in September 2026.

Gmail is filled with hidden features and add-on possibilities, but one of the service’s most powerful organizational tools is sitting right in the heart of its regular settings.

As you may have guessed by now (especially if you read this story’s headline, you clever little cat), I’m talking about filters — Gmail’s long-standing system for automating your inbox with a series of custom-crafted rules. At a glance, filters can seem complicated. They can seem overwhelming. They can even seem unnecessary.

But don’t let yourself be fooled by the feature’s curiously crusty exterior. Gmail filters have the potential to completely reshape your inbox and the way your incoming messages are handled. They can help you keep your email in order with no ongoing thought or effort.

And, unlike Google’s new AI Inbox option (which notably still doesn’t seem to be available for most people as of this writing), filters (a) don’t require your personal messages to be processed by generative AI systems — and (b) give you complete control over exactly how your email is handled instead of forcing you to rely on inherently unreliable technology to figure out what you want for you (and then likely come up short at least some of the time).

Best of all? All it takes is a teensy touch of one-time planning to get Gmail filters set up to your exact specifications and working for you quietly and automatically from that moment onward.

Follow the filter-centric Gmail tips in this guide, and your inbox will be running like a well-oiled (but not too greasy) machine in no time.

Part 1: Figuring out your Gmail filters

Let’s start by thinking through some Gmail filter possibilities to get an idea for the sorts of setups you might want to consider — then, we’ll go step by step through the process of creating them.

With Gmail filters, you could:

• Ensure messages from specific high-priority senders always go into your inbox’s Primary tab, where you’re certain to see them
• Ensure specific sorts of lower-priority messages — like invoices, reports, or updates from different services you use — automatically get sorted into an out-of-the-way location and never even show up in your inbox
• Keep messages from annoying people out of your hair (but still available in case you need to find them) by automatically archiving them as soon as they arrive
• Forward messages from a specific address or with a specific phrase in their subjects to other members of your team or family
• Instantly respond to messages to or from a specific address with a prewritten template
• Label messages sent to a specific variation of your Gmail address (like youraddress+vip@gmail.com) or written with a specific word or phrase in the subject (like “urgent,” “important,” or “hey jerkwad, pay attention to this”) as “VIP” and then receive notifications only for messages with that designation
• Mark specific types of messages from yourself as reminders by giving them a bright yellow “REMINDER” label that makes them stand out in your inbox
• Get a snickerdoodle delivered to your desk every time your boss emails you

All right, so that last one isn’t really possible (not yet, anyway) — just wanted to make sure you were still paying attention. Everything else in that list, however, is absolutely doable and actually quite easy to set up with Gmail filters.

Got some ideas of your own? Good deal. Time to make ’em happen.

Part 2: Creating your Gmail filters

The simplest way to start a new Gmail filter is to click the control panel icon — the symbol showing three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other — within the big search box at the top of the Gmail website. (Filters can’t easily be managed on mobile, unfortunately, so you’ll need to do all of this in a desktop browser.)

That’ll pull up a form where you can fill in whatever you want to use as the basis for your filtering — a word or phase that might appear within an email’s subject or body, an address from which a message could originate, or any other variable or combination of variables you like.

Fill in the fields as appropriate, using however many variables you want — even employing quotation marks around multiword terms along with operators like “AND” and “OR” between terms, if you really want to get fancy — and then click “Create filter” at the bottom of the box.

One quick warning: By default, your filter will apply to any and all incoming messages — hence the “All Mail” setting that shows up next to the “Search” option in the filter creation pop-up. If you change that option to “Inbox,” you’re likely to see an error message informing you that the parameters you chose are not recommended and may not work properly. Leave that “Search” option set to “All Mail” — which is probably what you want, anyway — and you’ll steer clear of any errors and allow things to work the way they should.

Now it’s time for the fun part — the part where you decide exactly what happens when a message meeting your conditions arrives. You can select any combination of actions from the list and then configure them as needed. You can even tell Gmail to apply your filter retroactively to messages already in your account (as opposed to using it only for new messages that arrive from that point forward) by checking the “Also apply filter to matching conversations” option at the bottom of the box.

Once you’ve got that finished, click the blue “Create filter” button — and that’s it: Your new Gmail filter is officially in place and active. The next time any message comes in that meets the parameters you outlined, the actions you specified will automatically take place faster than you can say “I embrace Workspace in my workplace cyberspace.”

Part 3: Managing your Gmail filters

Last but not least, make yourself a mental note in case you ever need to adjust your filters in the future: If you want to edit, delete, or even just revisit a filter you created, just click the gear-shaped icon in the upper-right corner of the Gmail website, click “Settings,” then click the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab at the top of the settings screen. You’ll see every filter you’ve ever created there and can tweak or remove any of ’em with a couple quick clicks.

Now if only we could find a way to get the filters to deliver those blasted snickerdoodles for us. Hey, Google: Any chance you can make that happen?

This article was originally published in October 2019 and most recently updated in September 2026.