Customise Gmail’s Priority Inbox View With A Super-Simple Hack

Customise Gmail’s Priority Inbox View With A Super-Simple Hack

Some of us prefer Gmail’s Priority Inbox view over the new tabbed inbox. If that includes you, this little trick will help you set up the inbox exactly the way you want it, using Chrome or Firefox’s built-in developer tools.

Jesse Beard, writing on the Psychic Tentacles blog, says he wanted to show only unread messages for certain labels in the Priority Inbox. Using instructions from Ben at Stack Exchange, he was able to apply additional filters to each section to accomplish that goal. You can hack your inbox sections similarly in a number of different ways (for example, only show emails labelled “work” that are unread). Here are the steps using this example, for Chrome:

  1. Set up the priority inboxes and your labels, if they aren’t already.
  2. Apply a filter to archive “work” messages coming in so they skip the main inbox.
  3. Go to Settings > Inbox > Options next to the inbox section you want to customise.
  4. Click “More Options…”
  5. Right-click or CTRL+Shift+C on the label (e.g., “work”) and select “Inspect element.” (Firefox users go to Tools > Web Developer > Inspect Element and click on the label).
  6. Look for the attribute cfg=”^all,Work” and change the value to cfg=”^u,^all,Work”
  7. Finally, select the work label on the page as normal.

This is what the code looks like:

Customise Gmail’s Priority Inbox View With A Super-Simple Hack

Other commands you can use include:

^i = Inbox

^u = Unread

^io_im = Important

^t = starred

^f = sent

^r = drafts

^all = All mail (include archive)

ie. ^i,^u,Work = all emails in your inbox, that are unread with the label “Work”.

That’s it! Your inbox will display the same in any browser after these hacks. Check out Jesse’s blog post for more examples and screenshots.

Using Chrome’s built in developer tools to customise Gmail’s priority inbox [Psychic Tentacles]


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