Are you tired of sorting mails in your inbox every day? Do you find your email inbox turning into a bottomless pit? Even though we have the coolest of apps and plugins and create folders to clean our inboxes, we inevitably find a cluttered email inbox once more. Where we go wrong is, we are still trying to do things in a manual way, when honestly everything around us is automated.

This time, let us try to automate your Gmail email inbox with the help of some tools. Check out these 5 things that you can do to automate your Gmail inbox and say good bye to email clutter forever.

1. Creating Labels in Gmail

The first important step for organizing your inbox is to create proper labels. Add different colors and make your labels look interesting and cool at the same time. Do not get overexcited and create different labels for every single email. The smart way to go about it is to create general or subject specific labels that will automatically define most subgroups of your emails. You can make labels like family, school, bills, pictures, resources among others.

How to create a label

1. Open the email message that you want to label and then click on the Labels icon.
2. You will get a drop down window. Enter the label name you want to give and then select if you want it to 'nest' under any other label. Like your primary label can be 'Social Network' and the 'nest' labels can be Facebook, Twitter, YouTube among others. It is just like creating folders and sub folders.
3. Now just click 'Create' and you are done.

Now when you want to view your emails with any particular label, all you need to do is just click on the label name on the sidebar and your mails are automatically filtered.

2. Filtering email messages

Just creating labels will not automate your Gmail. To get the best out of your pretty looking labels, you need filters that can automatically apply the labels for you. To put in simple words, they do the email sorting for you.

How to filter an email

1. Open the email message for which you want to create a filter. Click on the 'More' button and then select 'Filter messages like these'.
2. You will get a drop down as shown above. You now need to define your search criteria here. You can search by a specific email address, keyword or even a subject line. Once done, select 'Create filter with this search'.
3. You now need to tell Gmail, what happens when actually the mail arrives. Like if something is not of the highest priority, then you may want to Skip the inbox, mark as read and then apply a label. However, emails that require your immediate attention can be identified by flags or stars and then apply a label.
4. Click 'Create a filter'. You're done!

3. Gmail Labs

If you use Gmail, then you must enable Google Labs. These give you ready access to try out new features in Gmail. So, you get a demo rather than installing the tools in the first go.

How to browse and enable Labs

1. Click on the Settings
2. Now click on the Labs tab at the top.
3. Finally click, 'Enable' button next to Labs that you choose and finally click 'Save Changes' at the top or bottom of the page.

Here are some hot favorite labs for your Gmail account.

Canned Responses

If you are someone who is constantly replying to emails, several times a day, then it's best to create a canned response. Once you enable it, the option will appear as shown in the screenshot below:

Of course, you need to set up a canned response before you can use this tool. Once this is done, you wouldn't have to worry too much about managing your inbox manually every day. This is quite similar to what we do on our mobiles while selecting text message templates, to send quick sms.

Google Calendar gadget

Getting confused with all the meetings you have. With Google Calendar gadget you can now see a summary of all your daily calendar on the left of your inbox.

Signature tweaks

Your email is definitely going to look ugly if you have 20 same signatures collecting at the bottom. The smart way to go about it is keeping your signature accessible from the top', so that you can select to include or delete it.

Undo Send

How many times you have wished that you did not click on that 'send' button? Well, now you can actually take it back. All you need to do is click 'undo' within 5 or 10 seconds after clicking the send button. You can customize the time from the settings panel.

4. Multiple Inboxes

If you are not using Multiple Inboxes already, then you are definitely missing out on something. Before you configure Multiple Inboxes, you first need to enable the tool in the Google Labs and also set up your most important labels.

How to setup your Multiple Inboxes

1. Once you have enabled Multiple Inboxes, click on the Settings.
2. You will find the 'Multiple Inboxes' tab at the top.
3. Each 'pane' will represent a separate inbox on your main inbox page. You need to select the top 2 to 5 labels that you use most frequently. In the first column named 'Search query' you need to create a query to define each inbox. In the second column, create a name for your inbox.
4. If you want to create an inbox that is based on a label, use the query 'is: LABELNAME'. For example 'is:social media or is:URGENT'.If you want to create an inbox that has multiple labels then use a combination of parentheses and conjunctions AND/OR. When you use AND, it means that both labels must be true to fetch the emails. When you are using OR, it means that either one must be true.
5. Now select the number of emails reflected per inbox. Keep this number between 8 to 15. You can also select, if you want the additional inboxes to appear above, below, or to the right of the inbox.
6. Click 'Save Changes'.

   Now go back to your main inbox page. This page should automatically refresh. You will see your inbox is divided into different inboxes that you have designated.

5. Archiving Email

Many of us are still quite confused about archiving emails. Just to get the facts right, archiving is not deleting. Archiving is equivalent to putting your emails in a filing cabinet. The biggest advantage of archiving is, it keeps your inbox clean and makes sure that all your emails are relevant. You should archive an email when you do not require it immediately, but it has information that may be important or useful at a later stage.

How to archive

1. Open the email you want to archive and then click on the Archive icon.
2. If you want to archive multiple emails at once from your Gmail inbox, then just click on the box to the left of emails that you want to archive and then click the Archive button.

To view all your archived emails at any point in time, just go to your main inbox. On the left hand sidebar, scroll down and then click 'More' and then finally select 'All Mail'. This will pull all your emails.

Share your comments or ideas for more Gmail automation tricks.