How the Stars in Gmail Can Make Your Life Easier

Gmail has plenty of features; some awesome, and some that might annoy you. One option allows you to mark emails with stars or other symbols for easy categorizing. Let’s take a quick look at how you can use these to your advantage.

If you haven’t noticed, every email in Gmail has a star outline in between the checkbox and the “important” icon. Each time you click it, it cycles through several colors of stars as well as an exclamation point, question mark, or check mark.

If you use the standard Gmail inbox view with categories Primary, Promotions, etc. categories, starring an email will place it in your Primary box automatically.

Use of the stars and icons is up to how you manage email, but perhaps taking Mihir’s advice on Gmail labels would be a good place to start. Different colored stars could be used to mark important receipts, memos, etc. while the punctuation boxes could mean that you need to follow up on that email or make an appointment for it.

Those who don’t use these stars: if you accidentally click a star, you don’t have to click ten times to cycle through all options; just wait a few seconds and click it again to make it blank.

If you’d like to remove them completely, head to Gmail settings and under Stars you can re-arrange the order or remove stars from the rotation completely. If you’d like to use only a few you can do so, or remove them all to rid yourself of the feature.

Get more Gmail goodness with some new features you might have overlooked.

How do you use Gmail stars? Let us know in a comment!

Image Credit: Alexey Boldin via Shutterstock.com