How to clean up your Gmail sidebar
Web Services / / January 07, 2021
We remove unnecessary tags, categories and chat from there to make it easier to navigate in the mail.
If you've been using Gmail for a long time, your sidebar in the service's web interface is almost certainly in chaos. This block with unnecessary shortcuts and icons can be simply hidden by clicking on the three stripes at the top left, but this clearly does not solve the problem. Here's how you can clean up the mess.
Chat icons
First, let's turn off Hangouts chat and the Google Meet section cluttering the bottom of the panel. All the same, using these services from Gmail is not very convenient - it is better to open them in separate tabs.
Click on the gear icon in the upper right and select "All Settings".
In the Chat & Meetings section, select the Disable Chat and Hide Meet section from the main menu.
Then click "Save Changes".
Tags
Gmail tags are useful, but if you have a lot of them, you start to get lost in them. Fortunately, you can turn off the extra ones.
In your Gmail settings, open the Labels section. In the "Show in the list of shortcuts" column, select the "None" option for the tags you do not need. For example, it's unlikely that you constantly need to look into your mailbox folder if you prefer
send everything at once.For some tags there is an option "Yes, if there are unread". Select it, and the folder will be shown on the panel if it has something to read, and disappear when not needed. This way you can hide, for example, the tags "Spam", "Drafts" and "Trash".
And when you need them, just click on the "More" button, and the removed labels are again in front of you.
Categories
In addition to tags, the sidebar of Gmail also contains categories that are automatically assigned to received emails - "Social networks", "Alerts", "Forums" and "Promotions". If you don't need all this stuff, then in the "Shortcuts" menu, in the "Categories" section, this can also be disabled.
In this case, the option "Show in the message list" is better left, then you can access the categories using the tabs in the Gmail interface.
After all the above manipulations, your sidebar will look something like this.
This is much more convenient than the mess that was there before.
Read also🧐
- How to delete and restore your Gmail account
- How to get rid of the clutter in your Gmail account
- How to save emails from Gmail on your computer or move them to another mailbox