While your inbox will no longer be subdivided by automated categories, if you want to take advantage of the feature you can still look on the left rail and expand the Categories to see emails that have been identified as fitting into the categories. Then go to Inbox and uncheck the boxes next to the Categories. Go to the gear icon on the right side and click “See All Settings”.

If you don’t want to have Gmail automatically sort your inbox by these categories, you can turn them off.

These categories include Social, Updates, Promotions and Forums. Turn Off Categoriesīy default, Gmail applies Categories to email that show across the top of your inbox. If you don’t mind threading but wish that the messages appeared with the newest at the top you can add the Gmail Reverse Conversation browser extension. Now each message will appear separately, and you will see icons similar to Outlook to indicate if you have replied to a message or forwarded it. To turn off email threading in Gmail click on the gear icon at the top right to see the Quick Settings scroll all the way to the bottom and uncheck “conversation view”. Also, messages are threaded with the oldest at the top, instead of the newest – directly opposite of the Outlook experience where new messages appear before older ones. However, this can get confusing because if the thread is long and has people coming in and out of the conversation it can be difficult to see sort out what is going on. Gmail’s default is to “thread” conversations by subject.

Any time you make a change don’t forget to click “Save Changes”! Turn Off Threading If you switched from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail, or you use Outlook at work and wish Gmail for your personal email looked and functioned more like Outlook there are several settings you can apply to make Gmail more like Outlook. The interfaces to these two popular email programs are vastly different, but there are lots of ways to tweak them to make them look and function in a way that works for you. If you recently switched from using Gmail or MS Outlook and miss some of the features and layout of your familiar email application, there are some things that you can do to make Gmail look more like Outlook (or make Outlook look more like Gmail).

Gmail email setup for outlook