I don’t know about you – but I’m not a big fan of the changes that happened seemingly overnight to my GMail account creating “categories” for my inbox of Primary, Social and Promotions. My inbox is a mixture of everything I’ve been emailed and I’d like to keep it that way. As I read things and no longer need them, I delete them. If I need to save them I have my own set of personalized categories where I place everything. I don’t need GMail guessing what needs to go where and essentially giving me 3 inboxes to check per email address. (I have something like 11 email addresses and while all aren’t through Google/GMail that still ends up being a LOT of clicking that I don’t really need to be doing.) This comes after a couple weeks ago they decided to no longer let me select what emails I wanted to delete and I had to go through each one individually to delete them… (I’ve since modified my settings so it is now swipe to delete and not swipe to archive)

Anyway, fed up this morning when I saw the changes I went through the settings. If you go to the Settings for your email you want to make the switch on, there is one that says “Inbox Categories” click that and then there are all sorts of check boxes – Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. If you want categories, make sure they have a check. If you’d prefer everything be lumped in your “primary” inbox, uncheck them all so that it will default to only Primary.

This is what works on my Android (HTC One X) phone. On the web version, go to Settings once logged in and then to Inbox and you get the same check box categories to uncheck!

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One thought on “GMail Categories? Go Away!”
  1. Ug, these new categories are definitely annoying. A friend of mine mentioned the change this morning, and I thought I was lucky enough to have been spared, since I still had the plain old in-box. A couple of hours later, I was sent the “welcome” email. Thanks for the tip! My in-box now looks like what I’m used to. I had to click “configure inbox” under settings.

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