MANILA, Philippines – To make the email on your Gmail account easier to flip through, Google announced the arrival of a new organizational system to help users make the most out of their email inbox.

The Gmail Blog explains the main change as the addition of categories to a user’s emails, represented as tabs. Users can choose a number of categories for the new inbox setup. After finalizing the categories, Gmail then arranges existing emails in your inbox and all incoming emails according to the categories you’ve chosen, allowing users to determine the importance of any unread emails accordingly.

The 5 tabs are as follows:

• Primary: person-to-person conversations and messages that don’t appear in other tabs.
• Social: messages from your social networks and other social websites, such as Google+ and Twitter
• Promotions: deals, offers, and marketing-related emails
• Updates: automatically generated updates, such as bills, receipts, and the like
• Forums: messages from online forums, discussion boards, and mailing lists

The blog post also notes some customization options for the new inbox. You can select which tabs you want to use, drag and drop messages to transfer them to other tabs, set specific senders to always show in specifc tabs and include starred emails in the Primary tab, regardless of what category they’re set up in.

If a user prefers their former system for email usage, the option is also there to revert to the other older organizational formats.

Similar changes will also be applied to the Gmail apps on Android and iOS, and this new inbox feature will be made available to users gradually over the next few weeks.

Rappler will have a quick guide with tips to make the most out of the new inbox on Saturday. – Rappler.com