Knowledge base
Inbox tabs
The inbox sorted into Primary, Promotions, Updates, Social and Forums, so mail from people comes first.
Details
- Turn on “Sort the inbox into tabs” in Account → General and the inbox shows five tabs: Primary, Promotions, Updates, Social and Forums. The Inbox badge in the sidebar and the unread number in the browser tab title then count Primary only, and each other tab shows its own unread count. New accounts start with it on, and existing ones keep it off until they turn it on. Turning it on sorts the last 1,000 inbox conversations of the open workspace.
- Sorting follows plain rules, with no AI and at no cost. Primary takes mail from a contact or from someone you have written to, mail in a conversation you sent mail in, and mail from a personal mail service that carries no list headers. Social is mail from social networks. Forums is a mailing list with no marketing service or trackers behind it.
- Promotions is mail with an unsubscribe header that comes through a marketing service, carries trackers or is sent in bulk. Updates takes no-reply senders, verification codes, transactional services and other list mail. Everything else is Primary. A conversation sits in exactly one tab, and its newest message decides which.
- A choice saved for a sender comes before all of that. The menu of a conversation offers “Always show mail from [email protected] in” with the list of tabs, and picking one saves the choice and moves that sender’s inbox conversations there. The saved choices are listed under the inbox tabs setting, where each one can be removed. They apply to the whole workspace, so saving or removing one takes a person who reaches every address of the workspace, and a member limited to some addresses does not see the menu item. A category that one of your own rules sets wins as well.
- “Alert me for Primary only” is on by default: with tabs on, pushes, sounds and desktop notifications fire only for mail in Primary. Sorting belongs to the workspace and showing the tabs is each person’s choice, so category badges stay hidden for anyone who keeps tabs off.
- Search narrows to one tab with category:promotions, or is:promotions. A Gmail import keeps the categories Gmail gave the mail.
- On the REST API, GET /threads takes category, GET /threads/counts returns a row for each tab, and /sender-categories lists, saves and removes the choices for senders. The SDK has category on threads.list, plus threads.listSenderCategories, setSenderCategory and clearSenderCategory. The MCP server has category on listThreads and tools under the same three names.