After switching back and forth between various email clients, I have decided that the web interface for Gmail is the only one that works best for me. More than anything else, what I love about it (and need) is that it offloads the task of indexing and searching thousands of emails to another machine and my laptop doesn’t have to deal with that.

That being said, I am a big fan of the mail client built into the Opera browser. It’s fast, and I love the way it automatically sorts my mails according to mailing lists, flagged threads, contacts etc etc. One other feature that I love is the default “Unread” message view. It allows me to check my “New, unread messages until marked as read.”. You can even set it to display unread messages from the last week, month and so on. I wanted to replicate this in Gmail, and after some tinkering I think I managed to do it. Here’s how (all the following steps are referring to the Gmail web interface):

1. Go to Settings
2. Click on the Labs tab, look for “Multiple Inboxes”, enable it and click “Save Changes”
3. Now you should see a “Multiple Inboxes” tab. Click on it.
4. Under “Search query” fill out “label:unread”. (Under “Panel title” I filled “Unread” and in  ”Maximum page size:” I filled out 9).

   

5. I also chose to “Above the inbox” for “Extra panels positioning:”
6. Click “Save Changes” and go back to your inbox.

You should now see something like the picture below:

I’m really happy with this setting. Hope you are too (I’m not apologizing otherwise anyway)