When you open Gmail in your web browser, it defaults to the Inbox. The Inbox is where all you email goes but Gmail allows users to sort their messages using labels which are inboxes on their own. You can create as many custom labels in Gmail as you want and create rules to have messages sorted to the labels automatically. The only problem is that whenever you open Gmail, you default to your Inbox. If you’d rather directly open a label in Gmail instead of manually switching to it, you can.
Open A Label In Gmail
The process is pretty simple, and it’s similar to how you would open a different Gmail account if you’re signed into multiple accounts. Open Gmail in your browser and go to the label that you want to open automatically each time you visit Gmail and bookmark it.
If you look at the URL bar when you switch between labels, you can see that it changes according to the label you’ve selected.
Once you bookmark it, you can use the bookmark to jump straight to the label in Gmail. If you use it often enough, your browser will pick up on the URL that you frequently open. After a while, you’ll only need to enter the first few letters of the URL and autocomplete will suggest the label’s URL for you.
If you often need quick access to a lot of different labels, this trick will work but your bookmarks bar will quickly get crowded. If you decide to nest the labels inside a folder, you’re automatically making the process of jumping to a label in Gmail longer and maybe even a little inconvenient.
There’s no easy way to get direct access to labels. There aren’t very many, if any, browser extensions that make this easier. Even if Gmail were to allow users to select which label or inbox it defaulted to, there would still only be one pick.
For two or three labels, this works fine. If you like to keep the bookmarks bar hidden, this may take a little getting used to. You can try using an add-on that lets you auto-hide the bookmarks bar when you aren’t using it. This will make it so that you don’t have the bookmarks bar visible at all times and only when you need it. The alternative is to manually hide and unhide the bookmarks bar whenever you need to access it and regardless if you use the mouse to do it or a keyboard shortcut, it’s still tedious.