There are many reasons across campus to handle multiple email addresses. Committee emails, billing, etc. can all be coming into the same inbox and causing confusion. Let’s make those a little easier to handle.
Gmail has a “Multiple Inboxes” layout built just for this. We are going to go over how to set up this inbox layout.
Turn on Multiple Inbox
- In Gmail, click the cog button in the top right corner
- Scroll down to the Inbox Type section
- Select Multiple Inboxes
- Click Customize
Add inbox sections
Now we are going to add up to 5 inbox sections. By default, it has a starred and drafts sections. Delete or keep these as needed.
- In the Search Query box for Section 1, add
- to:[The receiving email address]
So if your second email address is billing@email.com, you would add “to:billing@email.com” without the quotes.
- Add a section name
- Click save changes
This is now what the Gmail looks like. I have added an additional inbox section for my Kaltura label.
- An inbox section with no emails will still be visible but empty
- An inbox section with emails can be toggled open or closed by clicking the section name
- The default Inbox section has not been changed.
NOTE: Emails from your Multiple Inbox sections will still display in your main inbox. We are just asking it to add an additional display for ease of use. These are not duplicates. If you delete the email, it will disappear from the Multiple Inbox section and the main Inbox.
Modify the inbox layout
Setting up the inbox sections is all that is needed for the multiple inbox option to work for you but there are other layout options you can explore. Choose any of these based on your working preferences.
These options are all located on the Customize page we navigated to in the first section of this article.
Multiple inbox position
The default is the multiple inboxes above the regular Inbox. You can also choose to put them below the Inbox or to the right so you see multiple at once.
The Right of the inbox positions option looks like this.
Filters and markers
You can turn on or off important markers and filters in the new inboxes.
Reading pane
The reading pane option is not available for the multiple inbox layout. If you would like to use this feature, you must use just a single inbox layout.
Dig in more
You can set up other kind of inbox sections using these filter options:
- From: specify a certain sender address
- Label: choose a label
- Is: show starred, important, unread, read or snoozed messages
If you want to dive into very advanced inbox querying, see the full list of operators in this Google Support article.
For any questions or assistance with setting up multiple inboxes, please contact the IDAT team.