If your inbox is packed with emails demanding for your attention, remember that not all communications are the same. Some should be transferred to the Gmail essential folder and addressed first, while others can wait much longer (or indefinitely).

Highlights:

• Gmail's essential folder prioritizes emails based on sender interactions, content keywords, and user actions.
• Customization options for Gmail's importance parameters are limited, but tools like Clean Email can help organize inboxes.
• Users can manually mark emails as important in Gmail through the web client or mobile app settings.

The Gmail essential folder is a dedicated folder that allows you to easily view all high-priority communications. When you choose this folder in the left pane, you enable the "is:important" email filter, which instructs Gmail to display only messages labeled "important". This means that Gmail's essential folder is actually an inbox filter option rather than a folder.

How does Gmail determine which emails are important?

According to Google's support page, the following conditions influence whether messages are routed to the important folder:

Previous interactions with senders: If you frequently read and respond to emails from a specific sender, the sender's communications will be prioritized over others.

Keywords from emails you read: Gmail's algorithms hunt for terms and phrases that are frequently connected with messages you open. If the same keywords appear in a newly received message, the message is more likely to be recognised as essential.

Inbox management actions: If you routinely designate as important or star certain messages while deleting or archiving others, the priority of subsequent messages from the same senders will rise or fall correspondingly.

Unfortunately, there are no Gmail critical folder options that allow you to customize these parameters. You can, however, use Clean Email, a capable inbox organizer that can effortlessly clean up thousands of unnecessary emails, as well as its Auto Clean feature to automatically label, star, archive, delete, mark as spam, and otherwise organize your Gmail inbox to naturally nudge Gmail's algorithms to prioritize or deprioritize messages. 

How to Mark an Email as Important in Gmail

Now that you understand the elements that drive the algorithms that determine how to identify emails as important in Gmail, you can learn how to manually mark a sender as essential. Ideally, you shouldn't need to use the manual approach too often, but it's a quick and simple way to prioritize specific messages or senders.

Web Client

• Launch Gmail in your web browser.
• Find the message you want to mark.
• Hover your cursor over the message until you notice the gray marker to the left of the sender's name.
• Click the marker to make it yellow. Gmail will automatically label similar communications as essential in the future.

iPhone/Android

• Launch the Gmail app on your mobile device.
• Find the message you want to mark.
• Open the message and tap the three horizontal dots in the upper left corner.
• Select the Mark as an Important option.