How to Get the Unread Message Icon In Gmail

Most of us tend to have Gmail open in a browser tab all day. That’s not completely a bad thing though. It allows you to see if there’s an important email that needs an urgent response. The problem, however, is that you need to click on the tab and look at your inbox to see if there’s a new email. And doing that few times a day certainly hampers your overall work productivity.

A neat solution to the above issue is getting the Gmail tab to show the number of unread messages. There are browser extensions to help you get that done, but Gmail users have always wanted this to be a default feature. Good news – you can now enable that feature through Gmail Labs.

Lets see the steps involved in the process.

1. Go to Gmail Labs

Simple – just click on the green labs icon located at the top left of your Gmail window. You obviously should have Labs enabled for that icon to show up.

2. Look for “Unread message icon”

Right, scroll down, and you should find a feature named Unread message icon. Enable it, and hit Save at the bottom.

3. You’re done!

That’s about it! You should now see a number count of unread messages on the Gmail favicon, just like you see in the image below.

If you are wondering how to remove Gmail tab to just the favicon, like you see in the screenshot above, well that could be done using Chrome’s pin tab feature. You just need to right-click on a tab and hit Pin tab for that to work.

Hope this feature makes you more productive in your day to day activities involving computers and the internet.