More on Tidy Inbox

I want a quick way to switch between Low Priority folders and Inbox like the Outlook app. Right now it’s 2 clicks away.

First of all, Tidy Inbox should not be compared to Outlook’s Focussed Inbox. There’s a big difference. Outlook filters out all mails they think are not important for you. That could be a mail from your new colleague asking you for some help, a support ticket notification, a mail sent to your team email ID or an Amazon newsletter. That’s why they have a quick tab for you to switch to see the mails that you have missed in the focussed inbox.

However, we’re clearly doing something else. We don’t want you to miss mails from your colleagues.

Tidy Inbox is simply a mechanism to predictably remove unwanted mails from Inbox to a folder which is out of sight, based on your discretion. Hence a tab to quickly switch between low priority and inbox would be counter productive. It mostly works best if you wish to ignore those mails altogether. If you want, you can visit them once in a while and maybe bulk unsubscribe or just delete the junk.

If you don’t have an unwanted email problem in your inbox, we recommend you to not turn on Tidy Inbox. Use it only for those accounts where you get a lot of junk mails in your inbox.

I do read some of the newsletters. I have subscribed to them.

If there is a newsletter you don’t want to miss out on, please move it to inbox so that the system learns and automatically moves it for future emails. That way you will be getting just the newsletters you want in inbox and not the other junk.

I don’t want to miss out on my Daily Quora Digest.

If you don’t want to miss out on a particular social media email just move it to Inbox. They will start coming to inbox in the future and you wont miss out on them. If you think all social notifications are important to you, just don’t select it to be removed from Inbox.

I want Newsletters to be removed from inbox but would like to know when I have new incoming there.

You can sync Low Priority folders to see unread mail count against them. On mac app sidebar, just right click on the folder name and select ‘Sync’.

I live in All Inboxes. It’s painful to go to Low priority folders if i have 5 accounts.

True. But once you have set up things as described above, you should be avoiding the low priority stuff, like spam. We do have plans to build All Low Priority folder along with All Spam, All Trash, All Sent, All Drafts etc. in the future. No ETA though.

Why only Newsletters and Social media mails?

It’s just the start. Most of the newsletters are unwanted and unasked for. They keep coming back even after you unsubscribe or mark as spam. It’s not a big deal for Gmail users, but for other accounts this is a real problem. In today’s word of mobile apps and notifications, email updates from social media are also mostly unwanted. So, removing them is one level of making your inbox tidy. We have more things in the works to make your inbox and new mail notifications even more distraction-free.