How to unearth all your old unread emails in Gmail's Priority Inbox

There's no shortage of ways to manage your email, but if you use Gmail, here's a one-two punch that'll quickly clean up your inbox.

The crux of our email overload comes down to two things: too much quantity and needing to sift through that deluge to get what you actually need. To fix the first issue, try Gmail's Priority Inbox.

Once turned on, the feature sorts your email into four main categories: Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates. You can drag and drop emails to move them between categories, but by and large, this system will let you weed out the hundreds of shopping newsletters you were probably never going to read and keeps the important stuff right in front of you.

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To enable Priority Inbox, choose "Inbox Type" under Settings, which you can access using the gear icon in the upper right corner of your inbox. Once you've got it, your inbox will look like this:

Credit: gmail

But, alas, you can't stop there. Your Primary tab will default to reverse chronological order for unread emails, so if you keep things unread as a way to remind yourself to address them, they'll get buried in short order. Neatly sidestep this issue by doing boolean category search of your inbox.

Copy and paste "category:primary is:unread" into the search bar and it'll pull up all the important emails that remain unread. Voila! Treat this as your to-do list for for the day, and never worry about email overload again.

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