If you have an active email account, you are likely to receive hundreds of messages from people claiming your attention in your inbox. Consequently, looking through each new email to select the most important becomes a daunting task.
Fortunately, if you use Gmail, you have dozens of functions and ways to sort, customize, and organize your inbox and other folders to make it more manageable and give you more control over your search for messages.
You can sort Gmail by sender, size, recipient, subject, tag, attachments, chats, message text, and date.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to organize, find and automate your Gmail app by sorting messages using the Sender, Label, or Subject filters.
How to sort Gmail messages by sender
The first step to organizing and cleaning up your Gmail inbox is to get rid of the hundreds of promotional emails that take up over 90 percent of your storage. They are mixed with legitimate emails from your personal or business contacts, most of which can be important and not meant to be trashcanned.
If you’ve tried to select every ad message in your inbox, you may be running out of energy due to the sheer number of messages, and you’ll probably end up deleting a few important ones in the process.
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Sorting Gmail by sender will help you group emails from specific senders together and delete them in one go, saving important and legitimate emails that need to stay in your inbox.
It also helps you save time when searching for a specific email from a specific sender and forwarding emails to your contacts. In short, you have more control over your inbox and you can stay more organized and productive every day.
There are several tricks you can use to sort Gmail by sender and see all emails from every person in your contact list. Below we will show you how to do this.
Method 1: Sort by specific sender
1. Open Gmail and go to your inbox. Select an email from one of the important senders in your contact list and right-click it.
2. In the new menu, click Find Emails From.
3. A list of all emails that you received from this sender on the way back will appear, including the full contact details of the sender. This way, you can quickly send them a message or even start a video call.
4. If you don’t see this person’s name in your inbox, do a quick search by typing his or her name in the search box, then right-click any message in the search results and select Search emails from.
5. You can use multiple search criteria by clicking the down arrow next to the search field. Then paste your email address in the From field, or use the Contains words field to refine your search with the name of the sender you are looking for.
6. When ready, click the search button to get an email from a specific sender.
Note. You can create filters for your search by clicking Create Filter and automatically apply certain actions the next time you receive emails that match the criteria.
Method 2: Sort Gmail emails from any sender
1. Go to the Google search bar and click the small downward arrow on the right to display the post search options.
2. Specify options to find your emails that include or exclude certain words. This comes in handy when you can only remember part of the conversation, as it finds emails in whole, not just by subject.
Note. Optionally, you can filter the search results to include only messages with attachments. There are other options, such as Date, that limit search results to specific dates or time frames.
3. When you find the correct sender, click Find Emails From to fill out the message list.
Method 3: Sort Gmail Emails Using Wildcards
Method 3: Sort Gmail emails using the wildcard function
This method helps when you need to free up email storage space and get the emails you want from hundreds of messages in your inbox.
If you have emails from former colleagues (with the same domain name) that you want to display at the same time, use the wildcard feature. This is indicated by an asterisk (*), which allows you to find multiple records with the same information.
1. Open your Gmail account. In the search bar, enter an asterisk (*) followed by the company domain name, for example *@free-online-converters.com
Gmail is part of the Google family of services, but unlike a search engine where you can limit search results to specific words or phrases using brackets or quotes, you cannot do the same in Gmail. Instead, it will return fuzzy matches if you try to use them in the built-in search function.
However, you can use parentheses to search for emails with multiple independent keywords, such as (Christmas party). It will receive every email containing each of the keywords in the subject line, and typing (Christmas OR party) will display all emails with any of the keywords in the subject line.
Sort Gmail by sender using the Gmail mobile app
On an Android or iOS device, you can sort emails in Gmail by sender by following the instructions below.
1. Open the Gmail app, sign in if you haven’t already, and then tap on the search bar at the top.
2. Enter the email address of the sender you are looking for and tap the search icon (the small magnifying glass icon on the onscreen keyboard).
Note. The mobile app does not allow additional search criteria to further filter results. In this case, you can use a desktop application and apply the first method.
How to sort Gmail by Label
In Gmail, labels are color-coded text identifiers that help you find the email you want faster. In the sidebar, you will see items like Inbox, Drafts, Trash, Spam, and others that are already configured for you and behave like tags or folders.
You can search for messages with specific labels in Gmail and use them to sort your inbox, as described below.
1. Select an email message in the Inbox to open it. You will see several icons right above the post and select the one that looks like a tag to display a list of shortcuts.
2. Click “Create New” to create a new label.
3. Enter a name for the new tag and click the blue Create button.
You can also tag multiple emails at the same time by checking the appropriate checkboxes before clicking the tag icon at the top, and then sort them by the desired tag from the list.
Now that you know how to apply labels to email messages, you can sort your email messages by label. Click on a label tag in an email message or in the sidebar and you will see all emails with a specific label.
Sort emails with smart stickers
Smart tags group your emails into five distinct categories, namely basic, social, promotions, updates, and forums.
This helps keep your inbox clean and orderly, instead of all emails from newsletters, notifications, promotions, and other messages showing up in your inbox at the same time. Gmail handles this automatically, so you don’t have to change any per-sender rules or customize them yourself.
1. To customize the smart label tabs in Gmail, click “Settings” in the navigation bar.
2. Click “Configure Inbox”.
3. Select the categories of messages that you want to appear on the inbox tabs.
4. Click “Save” for the changes to take effect.
You can also enable messages from flagged senders to be displayed on the General tab of your mailbox, even if they go to other tabs. For example, if you receive a promotional message, you can flag it and it will appear in your main inbox.
This way you can keep track of important messages and follow them easily later.
How to sort Gmail by topic
1. If you prefer to sort emails by subject rather than by sender or label, you can easily do this by typing the appropriate words in the “Has words” field.
2. Separate the words with commas and then go to the search option below. By default, this setting is set to search all messages, but you can change it to search only emails filtered by a specific label or mailbox.
This method is applied to items that ended up in the Spam or Trash folder.
Conclusion
Gmail’s automatic sorting tools can sort your email for you, but if you want to be more practical, you can make the tips from this guide a part of your daily routine. You will not only save time, but you will also be organized and productive.
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