A must-try Android email upgrade

Ahem: I have two separate confessions to make, both equally embarrassing.

Confession #1 is that I love email. I’m totally not kidding, either. It’s about as uncool of a thing as possible to adore, I realize — I mean, everyone hates their inbox, right?

For me, though, email is a brilliant communication system. It’s a refreshingly versatile and direct way to reach both anyone and everyone, whether we’re talkin’ individual messages for personal and professional purposes or full-fledged publications like the titillating tech newsletters I send through my ever-evolving knowledge-sharing collective, The Intelligence.

So, yeah: I frickin’ love email. Sue me.

Confession #2 may seem counterintuitive on the surface, given that gut-spilling humiliation I just put myself through. But I promise, it actually makes sense: I, the guy who endlessly writes about email and built an entire livelihood around the idea of email as a communication channel, also….hate email.

Surely you’ve both adored and abhorred something at the same time, right? Email can be wonderful, and I rely on it daily in so many ways. But man, it can also be an endless migraine-maker because of the way other people insist on invading my inbox with eternal demands on my time. (If you’re someone who has ever emailed me, I swear, this isn’t about you. I still love you. I just hate email. Sometimes.)

The biggest challenge with email — whether you love it, hate it, or a mix of the two, like me — is finding a way to focus on the stuff that matters while tuning out the noise. And while we’ve got no shortage of tweaks and tools for taming the jungle of your inbox, the real problem, especially on the phone front, is figuring out how to turn email notifications into something that isn’t a uselessly distracting all-day drone.

It’s the exact type of nerdy problem I love to tackle, and today, I’ve got an inspired new solution for you to put to use.

[Why stop with emails? Take your entire Android notification game to soaring new heights with my free Android Notification Power-Pack — six powerful enhancements for any Android device.]]

A new approach to Android email notifications

All right, so, first things first: By default, most Android email apps tend to take one of three approaches with email notifications:

They bombard you with alerts for every stupid email you receive, thereby causing you to be constantly distracted and/or to tune the alerts out entirely.

They hit you over the head with alerts for every email they deem to be “important” or “high-priority,” which similarly bleeps and bloops and interrupts you for all sorts of messages that don’t actually require your immediate attention.

They don’t notify you at all, thereby allowing important and at times timely stuff to slip through the cracks and remain unnoticed until you happen to open up your inbox.

None of these paths, suffice it to say, is optimal. So what if there were a better way — a way you, the non-artificially intelligent human who actually understands which emails need to notify you and which do not, could intelligently control your Android email notifications and proactively decide which exact emails alert you?

My friend, prepare to have your mind blown.

This tip is actually a two-parter: First, I’ll show you a simple way to categorically create alerts for emails that meet specific conditions while turning off all the other ruckus. And second, I’ll show you how to apply that same formula on the fly to specific limited email threads so you can flag individual conversations for ongoing alerting, even if they don’t meet your general notification-generating conditions.

Whew! That sounds like a lot, I know. And there’s a fair amount to this. But I promise: It’s actually quite easy. And once you get this set up this once, it’ll then Just Work™ from that point forward — with barely any ongoing effort required.

Ready?

Step 1: Disable the default Android email alerts

Before we can improve your Android email notifications, we need to get rid of the underwhelming ones that exist by default.

We’re gonna use Gmail as the example for all of this, since that’s the default email app on Android and the one most Android-appreciating animals rely on. But if you’re using Outlook or any other Android email app, you should be able to set up something similar by finding the equivalent steps and actions within that environment.

For Gmail, our first step is gonna be to disable all the standard existing email notifications — ’cause unless you actually want to be notified for every single email that arrives in your inbox all day long (or even every email that Gmail determines might be “important” to you), those notifications probably aren’t serving you well.

So do this:

Open up the Gmail app on your phone.

Tap the three-line menu icon in the app’s upper-left corner and then select “Settings.” (You might have to scroll down a bit within the menu before you see it.)

Tap the name of the Gmail address you want to adjust for these purposes.

Tap “Notifications” and make sure “All” is selected in the pop-up that appears.

Cool? Cool.

Now, back in the main settings menu for your Gmail account:

Tap “Manage labels.”

For any label you see with “Last 30 days” beneath it, tap its line and uncheck the box next to “Label notifications” — so that it looks like this:

Turning off your default Android Gmail notifications is the first step to a more enlightened approach.JR Raphael, IDG

Again, be sure to repeat that for every label in the list with “Last 30 days” beneath it so that none of those labels will create notifications for you from this moment forward.

And now we’re ready to tell Gmail which emails you actually do want to be notified about.

Step 2: Set up your new Android email trigger

For this next step, you’re gonna need to access Gmail on a computer. For reasons I cannot fathom, Google still doesn’t make it possible to create and edit labels or filters on Android here in the year 2025 —  when so many people are using mobile devices so much of the time! — and this means you’ve gotta get to the desktop Gmail website to make it happen.

Once you’re there, click the gear-shaped icon in the site’s upper-right corner, then click “See all settings” in the panel that pops up.

Then:

Click the “Labels” tab at the top of the screen.

Click the “Create new label” button, in the “Labels” area of the page.

Type Notify in the field for the label’s name and click the “Create” button to save it.

This new Gmail label is the key to smarter Android email notifications. (Just wait!)JR Raphael, IDG

Easy, right? Now we’ve got the Gmail label that’ll cause an email to notify you, and we’re ready to go back to the Gmail app on your Android device to set it up accordingly.

In Gmail on Android, head into that same settings section we were looking at a minute ago — by tapping the three-line menu icon in the app’s upper-left corner, selecting “Settings,” then selecting your Gmail address — and once more, tap “Manage labels” in the menu that pops up.

Find and tap the new “Notify” label we created. (If you aren’t seeing it yet, you may need to back all the way out of the app’s settings then go back in anew to force it to refresh.)

Then:

Tap “Sync messages” and choose “Last 30 days.”

Tap the checkbox next to “Label notifications” to activate it.

Tap the checkbox next to “Notify for every message” to activate it.

We want emails associated with our “Notify” label to create a notification, each and every time.JR Raphael, IDG

And with that, m’dearie, your foundation is set. And now we’re ready to create your auto-notifying formula and also learn the steps for flagging a specific email conversation for ongoing notifications as you go.

Step 3: Create your always-notify playbook

We’ll start with the auto-notifying formula — the parameters you want to create for which types of emails should always notify you, no matter what.

They might be emails from a specific sender — like your boss, an especially important client, or your illicit pet koala who periodically emails you hilarious marsupial jokes. They might be emails that come to a specific address, like a high-priority company account you’re tasked with monitoring. Or they might be emails that contain a specific phrase, like “site down” or “hilarious marsupial joke.”

Whatever the case may be, we’ve gotta go back to the Gmail desktop website on a computer once more to do the one-time initial setup around this — as, again, Google for reasons unknown won’t let you create Gmail filters from a phone.

So from the Gmail desktop website:

Click the search box at the top of the screen, then click the three-line control panel icon that pops up at the right of the box.

In the pop-up that appears beneath it, type in whatever conditions you want for the emails that’ll notify you — focusing on the “From,” “To,” “Subject,” and “Has the words” fields.

The “From,” “To,” and “Subject” fields are the most important pieces of this puzzle.JR Raphael, IDG

You can use quotation marks and the word OR to separate multiple terms, if you want to include more than one possibility within a single rule, but you’ll want to stick to just one field per rule — so only the “From” field or only the “Subject” field, for instance. You can then go back and repeat this process to create separate rules for other fields, if you want.

You can use quotation marks and the word OR to separate multiple terms within a single field.JR Raphael, IDG

Once you’ve got things set, click “Create filter” at the bottom, then check the box next to “Apply the label” and select that “Notify” label we made a moment ago.

Adding on our special “Notify” label is the secret sauce that makes this all work.JR Raphael, IDG

Click the blue “Create filter” button, and that’s it: Your rule is set. And any incoming emails that meet the conditions you specified will always notify you on Android, while all other emails will stay quiet.

Now, for the final piece of this puzzle…

Step 4: Prepare for on-the-fly alert enabling

The automated Android email notifying rules are great for making sure your phone alerts you to emails that you know in advance are gonna be important — based on who’s sending ’em or what they’re about.

But what about when you randomly run into a conversation you want to monitor that doesn’t meet those conditions — say, a specific email thread with a potential business partner or realtor (or even a koala realtor who happens to be a potential business partner) that you really want to watch for replies around right now?

With the system we’ve created, adding any such email on the fly into your alert system is easy.

The way you’ll do it varies slightly depending on whether you’re sending the email from a desktop computer or from Android.

From a computer:

Start a new email like you always do in Gmail.

Click the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right area of the compose box. (You can do this before or after you’ve written the email. It doesn’t matter!)

Hover over “Label” in the menu that comes up, then find and click the “Notify” label we made a little while ago.

The Gmail website makes it especially easy to add a label as you’re writing a new email.JR Raphael, IDG

That’s all: You can now just send your email normally, and it’ll have the “Notify” label applied from the get-go — meaning any new replies coming into it will trigger your Gmail Android alert and create a notification on your phone.

If you want to add an existing email thread into your notification mechanism, meanwhile, you’ll just click the label-shaped icon above it (or click the three-dot menu icon above it, if you don’t see a label icon, and select “Label as” from the menu that pops up) — or use the L keyboard shortcut, provided you’ve got Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts activated — and select our spiffy new “Notify” label.

From Android:

The Gmail Android app doesn’t make it quite as simple to add a label onto a new email on the fly, while you’re actually writing it. So in that scenario, when you want to have any replies to a specific email thread notify you, you’ll need to first send the email and then head into your Gmail Sent folder (located within the app’s three-line main menu) to add the label onto it right after.

Just open the email from there, then tap the three-dot menu icon above it and select “Change labels.” Find and select “Notify,” and boom: You’re good to go.

With any email you’ve received or you’re replying to, it’s even easier: Tap that same three-dot icon in the upper-right corner while viewing the email, then select “Change labels” and tap “Notify.”

And with that, give yourself a well-earned pat on the back. You, my koala-obsessed companion, just gave your Android email a magnificent upgrade. You won’t be bothered by needless notifications ever again, and you’ll always know when something important hits your inbox.

That’s an enlightened way to handle email notifications on Android. That, you might even say, is what one could call Android intelligence.

Treat yourself to even more advanced Android notification wizardry with my Android notification power-pack — a free gift when you sign up for my weekly Android Intelligence newsletter!