We earlier mentioned that you can use labels and indicators to help you sort your email visually at a glance. And you can set this up with a few simple steps.

You have two means of identifying at a glance at your inbox which emails are likely to be of higher priority. First, you can set Gmail to give visual cues when a message has your email address in the “To:” addressee field. You can also set Gmail to give cues when your address is included as a “CC” or if you’re included as one of several recipients.

To activate this, simple click the Settings link, and you will find the Personal level indicators feature.

If activated, conversations in your inbox will be marked with a >> (double bracket) if the message is directly addressed to your email address, and a > (single bracket) if you are one of the addressees. Gmail will not include any symbols if your email address is not part of the To nor CC field.

Secondly, you can activate the Show snippets feature, so Gmail will show the first few words of the email alongside the subject, if the browser window width allows for such a space. With this, it’s easier to see at first glance whether a conversation is worth opening.

Snippets are also useful when you’re doing keyword searches on Gmail. Instead of just being presented a list of emails with subject lines, you actually see a few lines from the message that contains the keywords you searched for.

Lastly, there’s the use of labels and filters. You can define messages to automatically get labels based on sender, send-to address, subject, and other properties.

With these, you can easily see at first glance on your inbox which messages are more likely to be more important and worthy of more immediate attention.