Google today announced a brand new inbox on desktop and mobile that offers improved filtering in the form of a tabbed layout, which supports up to five different organizational tabs.
We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more. All of these emails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done. Sometimes it feels like our inboxes are controlling us, rather than the other way around.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Today, Gmail is getting a brand new inbox on desktop and mobile that puts you back in control using simple, easy organization.
The new design, which lets users organize bulk mail into specific categories, will be used both on the web and in Google’s mobile apps. Categories include Main, Social, Offers, Notifications, and Forums, and users can customize the inbox by selecting which tabs to use.
Messages can be dragged and dropped between tabs and Google allows users to set email from a particular sender to always appear in a specified tab. Tabs will need to be configured via the desktop, but will be displayed on mobile via a tray that slides out from the left side of the Gmail app.
The redesign will be deployed to both mobile and desktop users on a rolling basis over the next few weeks, and enabling the tabs will require Gmail users to implement the new inbox feature by selecting “Configure Inbox” when the option appears in the Settings menu.