The tabs serve to separate and group incoming messages into broad categories, including ‘social’, ‘promotions’, and ‘updates’. For example, emails about your Facebook friends are stored under the Social tab, while marketing emails about upcoming sales go to ‘promotions’. While Google uses filtering algorithms to automatically sort email, users also have the option to fine-tune categories by forcing messages from specific senders to a specific tab. But it doesn’t have to be. Today Gmail is getting a whole new inbox on desktop and mobile that puts you back in control thanks to simple, easy organization. In addition to a revised webmail interface, the new look and features are also coming to Google’s own Gmail apps for Android and iOS. Instead of tabs at the top of the screen, mobile users can access their categories via a swipe menu. Of course, some users may not care about the changes and may prefer the traditional look and functionality. Google promises to keep a “classic view” switch available in Gmail’s settings that will allow any user to revert to traditional style. However, it is not clear whether the classic view will be available in the updated mobile apps or if it is limited to desktop webmail users. The new Gmail will be rolled out ‘in the coming weeks’. Users who can’t wait that long can try out the new look before it becomes generally available by choosing Configure Inbox from their Gmail gear menu. This “pre-release” is not available at the time of this article but should come online in the next few days.
