Free Your Inbox: Easily & Automatically Prioritize Emails With These Free Tools

• March 7, 2013
• By Er.Somesh Bhardwaj

Email has almost completely replaced snail mail communication. Now everyone is trying to get into your inbox. From family and friends to companies and advertisers, they all demand a piece of your attention. If you have not been managing your inbox with filters and other prioritization tools, it must be a mess. And with ever more emails cluttering it up, it’s easy to lose track. Have you ever missed an important email?

About a year ago I said goodbye to my desktop email client and switched to Gmail’s online interface for good. It was a big change, but since then I have learned a thing or two about managing emails. This article shows you three hassle-free and automatic ways to prioritize emails, including one that doesn’t require Gmail. These tools will ensure that you never miss an important email again.

Starting Over With Email Or First Time Organizing Your Inbox

When you are switching to a new email address, email client, or have never ever put much effort into organizing your inbox, I highly recommend giving OtherInbox Organizer a try. That is if you use AOL, GMail, Yahoo!, or iCloud with their native / web interface or IMAP. Organizer analyzes all your emails and sorts them into different folders. It cuts out the clutter and only leaves your most important emails in your inbox.

I tried Organizer with my Gmail account. After signing up, Organizer proceeds with scanning emails to organize senders. This can take a while and you don’t have to stick around for it to finish.

The next day I noticed new labels had cropped up in my Gmail account. In Gmail, Organizer sets up an OIB root label with several sub-labels, ranging from Business to Travel and everything in between. Emails that Organizer recognizes, but isn’t sure about seem to be labelled as Home. In my case that included notifications from Doodle, Dropbox, and Skype. Upon closer inspection, I found that Organizer had sorted over 30,000 emails in my Gmail account.

From the start, Organizer recognized almost all of my newsletters, social network notifications, group or list mails, and much more. Compared to the labels and filters I had set up previously – all in tedious manual work – Organizer performed very well. It even took care of some new senders that I had not submitted to any filters, yet. And every day, there is a daily digest that summarizes what Organizer has done with incoming emails.

Organizer isn’t necessarily perfect, however, it’s flexible. If there are emails you would like to sort differently, you can return to the OtherInbox web interface, find the respective sender, and change how it’s treated. You can create a new folder / label or disable sorting for selected senders.

What isn’t immediately obvious is that Organizer can learn. If you find a sender that Organizer doesn’t recognize automatically, drag the respective email to an OIB folder or label it manually. This will teach Organizer to sort all future emails from that sender into the selected folder and you should receive a respective notification email, which can take some time.

OtherInbox Organizer is a truly impressive tool. It will unclutter your inbox and help you focus on emails that matter in no time. And where it isn’t perfect, you can help it improve. If I hadn’t put so much effort into setting up complex labels and email filters, I would stick with Organizer in a heart beat. My only concern would be relying on an external tool and what would happen if it stopped being a free service or went out of business. In that sense, I’m glad I already have a system that works for me.

Verdict: Perfect tool if you have no clue how to manage the mess in your inbox!

Fixing Up An Existing Gmail Account With Priority Inbox & Filters

In my work email account I have been using Gmail’s Priority Inbox since last year. That is the only inbox I have ever managed to clear on a daily basis. Wouldn’t you like your inbox to look somewhat like the screenshot below? Priority Inbox puts important and unread emails on top, starred or important emails or any other selected labels (up to two) sit right below, and everything else is cued at the bottom.

You can enable Priority Inbox in your Inbox settings. It’s one of five inbox types. We have previously written about Priority Inbox here.

I found that Priority Inbox is very reliable. In some rare cases emails turned up in important and unread, although they were not from a regular contact and had not even been sent to me personally. However, on a daily basis, I only find emails that matter on top of my inbox. I had actually forgotten that I had Priority Inbox enabled – that’s how good it has worked for me!

Verdict: Set it up and find that it just works. You still might have to set up email filters, though.

Of course Priority Inbox isn’t all that I’m using to manage my work email account. I have also set up a bunch of filters to keep my inbox, particularly the everything else section, clear of clutter. This goes back to one of our key Gmail articles, 3 Things Pro Gmail Users Have Set Up In Their Accounts. You might also want to check out the 5 Gmail Filters To Help Prioritize & Organize Your Inbox.

Managing Multiple Email Accounts in Gmail with Multiple Inboxes

With Gmail you can manage multiple email accounts from a single interface. However, it can become quite confusing if emails from several different accounts end up in a single inbox. While labels offer a great way to sort emails and distinguish between different categories, they don’t necessarily provide a good overview. Enter Multiple Inboxes, a Gmail Labs feature that lets you view up to five additional inboxes in your Gmail Inbox pane.

Over the past year, I have been using Multiple Inboxes to get an overview of my inbox, starred emails, drafts, and emails under different labels. I admit that the Starred emails have gone a little out of control. Other than that, it has been working like a charm.

Multiple Inboxes is easy to set up and I have explained it in detail and with many screenshots here; just scroll down to the header Manage Multiple Email Accounts in Gmail.

Verdict: Great tool to maintain an overview over multiple labels or email accounts. Requires that you set up filters / labels.

Alternatives

Another tool I tired was the cloud-enabled desktop app Inky. It looks neat, but doesn’t seem very useful when it comes to prioritizing email. I didn’t find the Sort by Relevance feature very helpful, but instead found the app to be a little too simple and painfully slow. We mentioned Inky in this article: Email Goes Modern: Three Windows 8 Email Apps

For those of you using Outlook or Yahoo and wishing to manage multiple email accounts,this article may be useful.

Conclusion

Being completely sold on Gmail and having invested a lot of time in setting up filters, I found that the native Gmail tools Priority Inbox and Multiple Inboxes (via Gmail Labs) still work best for me. However, if you are just starting out with prioritizing emails, if you have an email account that isn’t Gmail, and if your inbox is a terrible mess, then OtherInbox Organizer will be a life saver!

Do you use any tools or techniques for managing your emails that we should know about? Please share in the comments!