How to Clean up your Gmail Inbox Automatically

Gmail has always had an excellent spam filter that keeps junk messages out of your Inbox. Then, earlier this week, Google added a reverse feature that is quite unique to Gmail – it’s called the Priority Inbox. Priority Inbox is like having a personal secretary whose job is to sort your incoming mail based on importance.

Priority Inbox is something similar it’s an intelligent, self-learning filter that automatically puts your most important email messages at the top of your Inbox so that you may deal with them first. The feature is now live for both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts.

Sort your Existing Emails Automatically

Priority Inbox has one limitation – it works with incoming emails only and doesn’t really care about the hundreds and thousands of messages that are lying in your Inbox unattended.

Other Inbox scans your mailbox for less-important emails and sorts them into relevant categories. For instance, email alerts from from CNN, BBC, Google News, etc. would go into the News folder while messages from Amazon, iTunes, etc. will find their place in the Shopping folder.

You just have to authorize Other Inbox to access your Gmail account once and it does the rest automatically. Other Inbox is reasonably good at categorizing your emails but you also have the option to choose your own labels (see next screenshot).

Depending up the size of your inbox, it might take anywhere between 5-10 minutes for the whole process to complete.

If you ever want to clear your inbox of all notifications from Twitter and Facebook, you can simply open the “Social Media” label and empty it with a click.

That said, a lot of us will obviously not feel very happy sharing our mailboxes with a third-party. Now they do have a privacy policy in place and you can always manually revoke access to sites that are authorized to access your Gmail and Google Account.