Gmail on its own has never provided email sorting options – you know, the thing you find in almost every other email client that is incredibly useful for scanning information and contextualizing things.
Their reasoning has always been that you can just use their advanced search to find what you are looking for.
But sorting emails is about scanning down a list of emails in a prioritized order to find something you don’t want to or can’t search for.
Its about working and processing emails in batches. It just takes too much time to start typing in search terms. You want a 2 click solution to sort emails by sender or by due date.
No other major email client comes without sorting and grouping, so don’t put up with it in Gmail!
The Solution
ActiveInbox for Gmail is our powerful browser extension which turns your important emails into tasks which you can keep track of, and then lets you sort and group emails so you can focus and scan through them to prioritize your work.
For instance, you can go into a label folder and sort the emails by contact or sender.
That allows you to now scan through your contacts who are involved with a project or issue and pick out emails to reply to based on who sent them, not just the date order of the emails.
You can see at the top that I’m grouping this ‘Action’ label (for all my current tasks) by ‘Contact’ and then sorting it by Deadline.
You can now chose to see only unread messages with one click – in standard Gmail you have to search for unread messages with advanced search.
ActiveInbox even lets you add deadlines or reminders to your emails you that you can prioritise things and make sure you don’t forget anything.
We’d love to make this a round-up of Gmail extensions that do the same thing but unfortunately there just are no others.
Sorting emails can make your life inside Gmail much easier, but ActiveInbox also brings along a bunch of other powerful tools to help you manage Gmail better like email scheduling or adding to-do lists and notes to an email.
This was written by Andy Mitchell