If you are always on the go, the Gmail app is probably among the most used apps on your Android 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.

Related

Gmail: The ultimate guide for advanced search filters

Find the exact email you’ve been looking for, or finally reach Inbox Zero

1 Turn 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.

1. Open the Gmail app on your phone. Tap the three-dot menu button inside the search bar at the top left to bring up the hamburger menu.
2. Tap Settings located at the bottom of the menu.
3. Select your Gmail account from the list.
4. Scroll down to the Meet section from the settings page that opens.
5. Turn off the Show the Meet tab for video calling option.

The Gmail app will automatically restart with the Meet tab hidden.

2 Change the default notification action button

Delete instead of archive

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.

1. In the Gmail app, bring up the hamburger menu by tapping the three-dot menu button on the top-left.
2. Select Settings, followed by General settings.
3. Tap on Default notification action and change the option to Delete.

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.

3 Tweak swipe actions to your liking

Quickly mark as read or delete

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.

1. Open the hamburger menu in the Gmail app by tapping the three-dot button at the top-left.
2. Navigate to Settings > General settings.
3. Select Swipe actions.
4. From here, you can configure the right and left swipes individually. You can set the swipe action to archive, delete, mark as read/unread, move to, or snooze an email based on your preference.

4 Get 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.

1. Open the Gmail app and navigate to Settings from the hamburger menu on the left.
2. Select the Gmail account whose notification settings you want to change.
3. From the Notifications section, tap Notifications and select All. If you don’t want notifications for any email that hits your inbox, tap None.
4. Tap Notify for inbox and select whether you want to be notified for all new emails or only the important ones.

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.

5 Enable 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 can enable action confirmation in Gmail’s Android app. This ensures that you need to confirm your action when deleting, archiving, or sending an email.

1. Open the Gmail app on your Android phone.
2. Bring up the hamburger menu by tapping the overflow menu button from the top-left.
3. Navigate to Settings > General settings.
4. Scroll down to Action confirmations. Depending on your preference, you can enable the option individually to delete, archive, or send an email.

6 Change 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 can change Gmail’s sync settings to avoid this from happening.

1. Open the Settings menu in Gmail’s Android app from the sidebar.
2. Select the Gmail account whose sync setting you want to change.
3. Scroll down to Data usage. Tap Days of emails to sync and select the days of emails to sync. You can sync emails up to 999 days old.

Based on your settings and preferences, the Gmail app will download the emails locally onto your phone for quick access even without the internet.

Related

11 best tips for using Gmail on Android

Level up your Gmail game on Android

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 to schedule emails. You should also learn how to reduce spam emails to keep unwanted clutter away from your Gmail account.