New Gmail Tabs — Learn How to Take Back Your Inbox!

Few things are quite as frustrating as when certain big-name companies change their systems and inadvertently destroy your productivity. I mean seriously…every time Facebook rolls out a new timeline design I find it infinitely more difficult to stalk the proper people in the way that I’m most comfortable. Give us a break developers!

Enter Google. We LOVE Gmail. It’s our life-blood. We count on it to deliver every message to us and we rarely have cause for complaint.

Recently however, Google decided to annoy the pants right off of a great number of people by making their lives (marginally) more annoying when they rolled out their all-new TABS system. The new system looks at incoming emails and tries to determine whether the email fits into a few different categories: Primary (regular emails), Social (social media emails) or Promotions (let’s be honest, this just means border-line SPAM!). It’s a nice thought, except that there’s nothing worse than having important emails get filtered out of your normal workflow.

Look, Google is smart. Their system is incredible good at reading your email and determining:
“Hey, this is obviously SPAM. I can tell because I’m pretty sure the Nigerian royal family doesn’t use a .ru email address. Don’t worry faithful user, you’ll never even see this email!”

Google goes very far to protect to their users—I’m told that only the NSA can recover your lost password (cough)—and that’s why we appreciate them as much as we do. But even a system as complex and accurate in making determinations of what constitutes SPAM and other promotions, there’s bound to be incorrectly filtered emails and that’s just not worth the trouble for most users.

Taking Back Your Inbox

With the melodrama out of the way, it’s actually very simple to return your inbox to it’s once glorious self. We’ve recorded a short walkthrough video to guide through the process of either using the tabs as they are meant to be used -OR- how to simply turn off the tabs altogether (our favorite solution!). Use the video player above to view the walkthrough.

Got a question, comment? Let us know if the comments!