How To Stop Gmail From Marking Emails As Important

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Google’s Gmail is known for its intelligent organization of emails. One of its notable functions is the ability to automatically categorize important emails, making it easier for users to manage their inbox. However, there may be times when you prefer to manually organize your emails. If you find yourself in this situation, this blog post will provide instructions on how to prevent Gmail from automatically labeling emails as important.

Understanding Gmail’s Importance Markers

Before we delve into the steps, let’s gain a quick understanding of Gmail’s importance markers. Important emails are denoted by a yellow marker in Gmail. Google uses several factors to determine if an email is important, including how often you interact with the sender, the keywords in the email, and how often you read similar emails.

Steps to Stop Automatic Importance Marking

To disable Gmail’s automatic importance marking, follow these steps:

  1. Open Gmail in your browser and log in to your account.
  2. Click on the gear icon situated in the top right corner of your screen. This will open a dropdown menu.
  3. In the dropdown menu, click on “See all settings”.
  4. In the settings menu, click on the “Inbox” tab.
  5. In the “Importance markers” section, select “No markers”.
  6. In the “Filtered mail” section, select “Don’t override filters”.
  7. Scroll down and click on “Save Changes”.

Your changes will be saved and Gmail will stop marking emails as important automatically.

How to Manually Mark Emails as Important

Even after you’ve disabled automatic importance marking, you can still manually mark emails as important. Here’s how:

  1. Open the email you want to mark as important.
  2. Click on the More button represented by three vertical dots in the top right corner of the email.
  3. In the dropdown, click on Mark as important.

The email will now be marked as important and the yellow importance marker will appear next to it.

Conclusion

Gmail’s automatic importance marking is a handy feature for sorting and prioritizing your emails. However, if you prefer to do it manually, Gmail gives you the flexibility to disable this feature. Remember, you can always switch it back on if you change your mind.