How to Sort Your Gmail Inbox by Sender, Subject, and Label (2024)

Gmail is a great tool, but it falls short in terms of offering intuitive ways of sorting your inbox. Fortunately, there are easy workarounds that give you more control over finding messages. Let's look at how to organize and sort Gmail by sender, subject, and label.

1. Sort Gmail by Sender

Unfortunately, there's no one-click way to sort Gmail by sender in the way that you can in a desktop email app. The closest you can get instead are several tricks that help you see all the emails you get from one person. The quickest is most useful when you've had an email from that individual recently, although you can use it whenever you're in your inbox.

Go to your inbox, locate any email from the sender you want to select, then right-click on that email without opening it. From the menu that pops up select Find emails from.

Almost instantly you'll see a list of all the emails you've ever received from that sender, even ancient ones that you've long since archived. You'll also see the full contact info for that sender, making it easy to send them a message or start a video call.

Don't see the desired sender immediately visible in your inbox? No problem. Type the person's name or email address into the Gmail search box first. Then just right-click on any of the messages it finds and select Find emails from once again.

2. Sort Emails From Any Sender

You can sort your Gmail inbox by any sender without even knowing the person's name. Go back to Google's search bar and notice the filter icon on the right-hand side. This is the Show search options button.

Click on the option and you'll see a box offering various ways to locate messages.

You can specify parameters to find emails that include or do not include certain words. This option finds them in whole emails, not just the subjects, and is useful when you can only remember what a conversation was about. You can also filter the results to only find messages with attachments.

See Also

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Play around with the features of the Gmail search box and become familiar with them. Use the Date within option to limit your searches to a particular time frame, for example. When you've found the sender you're looking for, use the Find emails from option that we looked at in the section above to generate a full message list.

Use Advanced Search Operators in Gmail

If you'd prefer not to use the search options, there's another method to try.

Like Google, Gmail recognizes advanced search operators. Type to:bob in the main search bar to find all the emails you sent to people named Bob.

3. Sort Your Gmail Inbox by Subject

Sometimes you need to sort your Gmail by subject instead. Perhaps you need to find all the emails people have sent you about an upcoming family reunion.

Go back to Google's search bar and bring up the additional search options. One of the boxes allows searching by subject. As you'll recall from the previous tips, it's also possible to search messages for certain words. Type some relevant words—get-together, gathering, event, and so on—in the Includes the words box, separated by commas.

Finally, turn your attention to the Search option at the bottom of the box. By default, it's set to search through all your emails. If this is too broad, change it to search only messages filtered to a specific inbox or assigned a particular label.

What if someone tells you they sent a message, but you don't see it in the inbox? You can search Spam and Trash like this, too. If the email got misinterpreted as junk mail or you deleted it by mistake, it's not lost if it is still in the trash. Just remember that Gmail automatically deletes all messages in the Trash after 30 days.

4. Look for Messages With Specific Labels

In the last section, we briefly brought up labels. If you're not familiar with labels in Gmail, think of them as a form of virtual folder. Assigning a label (or several labels) to an email is the equivalent of moving it into a specific folder, and you can use labels to sort your inbox. The big difference—and benefit—is that you can apply multiple labels to a single email.

Apply Labels to Emails

First, select any message in the inbox. When it opens, you'll see a row of icons above it. Choose the one with the tag-like image. That's Gmail's Labels button. Click it to bring up a list of all previously made labels. Choose Create new to make a new one.

You can also label several messages simultaneously by selecting their respective checkboxes (this is great for when you want to delete messages in bulk). Do that just before clicking the label button on the top of Gmail's interface.

You can also label a message after clicking into it instead of from the main inbox.

Sort Emails by Labels

Now that we've gone over applying labels, let's use that knowledge to sort your email, courtesy of labels.

It's very easy to do; just click the label tag in the sidebar of your inbox. You'll instantly see a list of all the emails tagged with the same label.

5. Automatically Apply Labels to Sent Messages

As you've seen here, applying a label is a fast and straightforward process. However, it's one more thing to remember while keeping tabs on your inbox. If you're a perpetually busy person, you might prefer not to take that step.

You can use labels when you create filters to sort and organize your inbox, and you can set up Gmail to automatically label your emails.

If you're working in a team, though, and need to make your email more efficient, you can use a third-party app called Gmelius to do the job for you. It's more suited for business-level use, and lets you share labels with your colleagues.

If you end up giving Gmelius a try, it has several ways to personalize your inbox. They don't relate to sorting messages but include other helpful possibilities. You can use it to track messages, share inboxes, set up email templates, and much more. Since you know how to sort your inbox, why not do even more with this feature-rich app?

Download:Gmelius | Chrome | Android | iOS (Free trial, plans from $15 per month)

Easy Ways to Sort Your Gmail

It isn't as easy as you'd expect to sort emails in Gmail. The service's automated sorting tools want to do it for you, and that isn't always enough if you want to be more hands-on. Fortunately, it is easy to learn how to organize your Gmail by sender, label, or subject.

It also helps to use Gmail browser tools for an improved experience and to keep your inbox cleaner and make you more productive.