Skip to main content

Explaining Gmail Categories in Message and Label lists

A few days ago, a peer of mine in the Gmail and Google Accounts help communities, shared with me a link to a thread where a user happened to mention seeing the Update category label in his messages even after he has deselected the categories in his default Gmail layout from the Inbox tab under Gmail settings.

The user also included screenshots which looked like the ones below:




Given how most of our Gmail is set up, this appeared odd. The categories are not labels; so, how could they appear as such?

Since the categories appeared as labels, it was apparent that the reason for this uncommon behavior should lie inside the Labels tab under Gmail settings.

In there, scrolling down below the System labels section, under Categories, it appeared as seen below, and the highlighted section resolved the mystery.


The click to show/hide in message list options, set to show, caused this unusual display of categories as labels in the user's inbox. When I clicked "Show" for the Promotions category, the one previously unlabelled message from the first screenshot showed up with the Promotions label.


"What does the Show in label list do then?", some would ask.


It simply places category labels above or below the More/Less marker in the Gmail label list in the left panel depending on whether they are set to show or hide. The screenshots below should help better explain this.

When all categories are set to show, all labels are displayed above the More marker.


When all category labels are set to hide, they are hidden from the displayed label list and can only be seen upon clicking the More marker circled in the first screenshot below.



If some categories are set to show and some set to hide, they are displayed accordingly above and below the More/Less marker.


Comments

Post a Comment

Please do not post spam or promote your own site(s). All comments are moderated and such comments will not be published.

Also, please keep your comment relevant to the topic of the article.

Finally, please do not post any of your personally identifiable information such as phone number, email address or other important details as this is an open platform.

Popular posts

Gmail 101

Wendy Durham (CWD in her A Gmail Miscellany blog and wdurham in the Gmail Help Forum ) was a Product Expert and a prolific contributor when it came to explaining the intricacies of Gmail and Google accounts. Due to changes to Gmail and Google Accounts over the recent years, some of her well-known blog articles are no longer applicable. The three most used articles have been updated here to be consistent with the current version of Gmail and in some cases, Google Account. This will keep them useful going forward as a tribute to her dedication to user education. The current version of the article is updated based on the changes introduced in the Gmail UI as of January 2022, following the announcement here .  All your Gmail basics in one place! A primer for new users of Gmail, which explains how to find your way around Google's innovative email service and to perform the basic email tasks of reading messages, sending messages and organizing your mail using Gmail's web interfac...
5 comments
Read more

Revisiting Canned Responses (Templates) in Gmail

I wrote my first blog on Canned Responses here - Exploring the Advanced Tab in Gmail Settings: About Canned Responses , noting "Believe it or not, there is no article on Canned Responses in the Gmail Help Centre. Probably because it has always been a lab feature in the past and now included under the Advanced tab under Gmail settings in the new Gmail. So, today we take a look at this very popular feature in Gmail and the different ways we can use it.". That has remained the case, so with a change of UI, there is a need to rewrite the tutorial on how we can perform the following functions for a Canned Response or as they are now known, Templates . Create a Template Insert a Template Edit or Overwrite a Template Delete a Template Thankfully, the prerequisites haven't changed. To start using Templates in Gmail, it needs to be enabled from the Advanced tab under Gmail settings. As always, be sure to click on the Save Changes button on the bottom of the page. ...
45 comments
Read more