More than 1.5 billion people use Gmail on a regular basis. Most of them probably spend far more time managing their email than they need to.

With a few simple Gmail tricks, you can reduce the number of unnecessary messages you need to filter through, keep tabs on who is sharing or selling your email address, and move around your Gmail inbox much faster.

Let’s look at 5 simple tricks to improve your Gmail experience.

Keep Your Main Email Account Clean

Gmail does a good job of filtering out spam but most of us receive a lot of email that isn’t technically spam but also isn’t urgent, or even necessary, to read. Marketing emails, newsletters, and mailing lists all take up space in your inbox and need time to filter through.

To keep your inbox tidy, with no unimportant emails to deal with, set up two Gmail accounts – one for important emails and one for all the rest. Only give your “important” email address to people you want to hear from and you won’t have to filter through as many messages to find the important ones.

Use Customized Email Addresses

Gmail lets you customize your email address with a dot or a plus sign so you can create unique addresses that still get delivered to your inbox.

You can use dots anywhere in your email address and Gmail will ignore them. For example, if your email address is [email protected], you could use [email protected] or even [email protected] and still receive the message.

The plus lets you add extra bits of information to the end of your email address and again, Gmail ignores it. Using the same example, you could use [email protected] when you buy something online and keep tabs on what else you receive at that email address. This is an easy way to see what companies are doing with your information.

Navigate Your Email with Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts can save time and help reduce the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome by reducing the amount of switching from your keyboard to your mouse and back.

Gmail supports a long list of keyboard shortcuts that make it easy to navigate around your inbox without your hands leaving the keyboard.

Pull Your External Email Accounts into Gmail

If you have non-Gmail email accounts and would like to have everything in a single unified inbox, Gmail can make that happen. You can have Gmail check these external accounts and pull those messages into your Gmail inbox.

Both POP and IMAP accounts are supported so it will work with most non-Gmail services.

Automate Your Gmail

Sorting through a long list of messages takes time but it’s necessary to be sure you don’t miss anything important. You can save time by automating some of this processing.

If you receive a lot of newsletters and marketing emails, the Unroll.me service will make it a lot easier to unsubscribe. It automatically identified these messages and lets you unsubscribe from several lists at once.

Sanebox.com will automatically filter your emails into categories of your choice such as newsletters, mailing lists, and important messages. It will keep your inbox clear of all the unimportant stuff so you can focus on the email you need to see and deal with the rest at a time of your choice.

You’ll get a weekly email showing how much time Sanebox saved you. It interesting to see how much time you actually spend on email, especially if you use a graph maker to track your stats over a longer period of time.

Inbox Managements with these Gmail Tricks

These Gmail tricks will help you tame your inbox, saving time and reducing the chance of missing an important email. They’ll help get rid of that stress you feel when you’re constantly thinking about all the unread email you need to deal with.

Did you find this post helpful? Check out the rest of our blog for more interesting articles.