How to disable top emails in Gmail apps

Managing your inbox on a phone is different than when you do it from the desktop. There are several factors to consider when reading emails on your phone; the smaller screen, multi-tasking on a phone, and making sure you don’t miss anything important. Email clients on the phone aren’t even as sophisticated as those on the desktop but Gmail makes a reasonably good effort. One feature it has is that it automatically groups top emails from various categories and this helps avoid missing important messages. If you don’t like the feature, you can disable top emails in the Gmail apps from its settings. Here’s how.

Disable top emails

Open the Gmail app and tap the hamburger icon at the top left and scroll to the very bottom of the navigation drawer. Tap Settings. If you have more than one account configured, you will have the option to disable top emails on a per-account basis. Select the account you want to disable top emails for.

Scroll down to the very end and look for the ‘Enable bundling of top emails’ option and turn the switch off. Make sure you quit the app on your device after making this change.

When you next open the app and visit one of the inboxes, the top emails will not be grouped together. Instead, everything will be sorted in chronological order.

This feature, and this option isn’t available on the web version of Gmail.

Enabling this option again is fairly easy however, turning the switch on doesn’t work as quickly as turning it off does. It seems the app will need a little time, and for some new emails to arrive. The app will then analyse and pick which ones are the most important. Top emails are only picked for the Social, Promotions, and Updates inboxes. For the Primary inbox, you won’t see top emails grouped together.

If you like items being grouped together but don’t like the top email bundles, you can change your primary inbox from the same account settings. There’s an Inbox type option that allows you to group important emails, as identified by Gmail, and replace the default Primary inbox with it. Other options include, Unread first, Starred first, and Priority inbox. All these options replace the default inbox which is a chronological view of your one-on-one conversations. Again, this can be set on a per-account basis if you have more than one account configured in the Gmail app.