Gmail for Android: 6 settings to change

If you’re always on the go, the Gmail app is probably among the most used apps on your Android phone. It makes it easy to manage your inbox and notifies you of all incoming high-priority emails. But Gmail’s Android app isn’t perfect. There are several settings you can adjust for a better experience. This will help speed up your workflow, ensure you are notified of all incoming email messages, prevent accidental deletion of important email messages, and more.

1 Turn off the useless Meet tab

No more meetings

If you don’t use Meet to schedule calls, its dedicated tab in the Gmail app will bother you. As someone who rarely uses Meet, I don’t need his tab taking up precious space in my email app. Fortunately, you can easily get rid of the Meet tab from the Gmail app. Even better, you can disable the Meet tab for each individual account. So you can hide it from your personal inbox and keep it for your business email account for quick access to scheduled calls.

1. Open the Gmail app on your phone. Tap the three-dot menu button inside the search bar in the upper left corner to bring up the hamburger menu.
2. Touch settings located at the bottom of the menu.
3. Select your Gmail account from the list.
4. Scroll down to Get to know each other section on the settings page that opens.
5. Turn off Show the Meet tab for video calls option.

The Gmail app will automatically restart with the Meet tab hidden.

2 Change the default notification action button

Delete instead of archiving

The beauty of Android’s notification system is that you can directly act on notifications. You can directly archive or reply to an email using the action buttons in Gmail notifications. The archive button is useful because it can help you reach that magic zero inbox and keep things organized. But what if you often trash your email instead of archiving it? You can dive into the settings of the Gmail app to change the default notification action.

1. In the Gmail app, call up the hamburger menu by tapping the three-dot menu button in the upper-left corner.
2. choose settingsafter which follows General settings.
3. Touch Default notification action and change the option to Delete.

Instead of Archive, you’ll get an action button to delete an email from your phone’s notification screen. Unfortunately, you have set any other action for the notification action button. The Delete button is also not customizable.

3 Adjusting finger gestures according to your preferences

Quickly mark as read or delete

You can swipe left or right on emails in your Gmail inbox to delete or archive them. This is a great feature because it allows you to quickly take different actions on various emails in your inbox. Even better, you can customize the strokes according to your preferences and requirements to speed up your workflow.

1. Open the hamburger menu in the Gmail app by tapping the three-dot button in the upper-left corner.
2. Navigate to Settings > General Settings.
3. choose Swipe actions.
4. From here you can configure right and left swipes individually. You can set the transition action to archive, delete, mark as read/unread, move or snooze the email according to your preference.

4 Receive notifications for every email

Because all emails are important

By default, the Gmail app for Android only notifies you of high-priority emails. This ensures that you are not bothered by spam email notifications. But in some scenarios, you might want to be notified of all email messages that arrive in your inbox, even when you’re on a mobile phone. To do this, you need to dive into the settings of the Gmail app and change its notification settings.

1. Open the Gmail app and go to settings from the hamburger menu on the left.
2. Select the Gmail account whose notification settings you want to change.
3. In the Notifications section, tap Notifications and select all. If you don’t want notifications for any email that arrives in your inbox, tap No.
4. Touch Inbox notifications and choose whether you want to receive notifications for all new emails or only important ones.

The Gmail app lets you set notification settings for each individual account. This way, you can ensure that you are notified of emails that arrive in your work account, while only receiving notifications about important emails in your personal inbox.

5 Enable action confirmation

There have been instances where I’ve accidentally tapped the send button in Gmail’s Android app while replying to an email. This becomes even more of a problem when you realize that you can’t revoke a sent email within seconds of sending it, like on the web. The same goes for archiving or deleting emails. One accidental touch can cause an important email to be deleted or archived.

To prevent this, you can enable action confirmation in the Gmail app for Android. This ensures that you have to confirm your action when deleting, archiving or sending an email.

1. Open the Gmail app on your Android phone.
2. Open the hamburger menu by tapping the overflow menu button in the upper left corner.
3. Navigate to Settings > General Settings.
4. Scroll down to Action confirmations. Depending on your preferences, you can individually enable the option to delete, archive or send an email.

6 Change your Gmail sync settings

By default, the Gmail app for Android syncs and stores email for the last 30 days. This is good enough for most users. But if you often find yourself without internet access and can’t access important emails from more than a month ago, you can change your Gmail sync settings to prevent this from happening.

1. Open it settings menu in Gmail’s Android app from the sidebar.
2. Select the Gmail account whose sync setting you want to change.
3. Scroll down to Data usage. Touch Number of email days to sync and select the email days to sync. You can synchronize email up to 999 days old.

Based on your settings and preferences, the Gmail app will download email locally to your phone for quick access even without the Internet.

Stay up to date with your inbox

Changing the above settings in Gmail’s Android app will make it easier to tame the chaos in your inbox. In addition to the above settings, Gmail for Android includes several useful features, including the ability to schedule emails. You should also learn how to reduce spam to keep unwanted clutter out of your Gmail account.