Your GMAIL Inbox Is Changing - A Heads Up & A Quick Fix

Monday night I signed into one of my GMAIL accounts and I found that I was looking at a brand new kind of inbox.  An inbox with tabs now.  Initially, I'm not sure I'm happy about the change.

When I logged in, I had that "Welcome to your new Gmail Inbox" pop-up and the usual explanation window ready to help me through my new process.  Wha?

My in box now has tabs.  Primary, Social and Promotions tabs.  Now, instead of 272 unread items in my inbox, I have 80 unread emails in my Primary tab, about 75 unread in my Social tab and the rest of my email in my promotions tab.

They got very little right as far as what goes where.  And suddenly, I'm seeing a lot of work ahead of me to help Gmail learn where what goes where.

To me, as I tool around the options, this feel exactly like "tags," so what's the point of tabs?

On the bright side, there's a quick fix if you want your old inbox back.

To the right of your tabs, is a "+" for "adding more tabs."

If you're brave enough to go there, you'll see a few other tab options to add, or, you can uncheck the Social and Promotions tab options and everything goes back to the way you want it or are acclimated to.

If you get "buyers remorse" and want them back, you can always go into "settings," "inbox," and there's now a "categories" section where you can pick out your tabs again.  Ah... so tabs are actually categories.  Most interesting.

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And for now, that's how I'm going to treat it.  At least that is, until Google forces me* back into the Gmail tabs mode.  If that's their intent with this new change.

For now, I'm sticking to the old.  My time is pretty crazy valuable and I don't have the time to screw around with my inbox.  I have accounts for my different websites, for contest (junk mail) entries and then some.  This would be a horrible time-sink for me.

Well, any way, that's my new Gmail heads up and fix (temp?).

UPDATE: 7/30/13:

Someone made a great point about this new system and I had not thought about this new perspective... If you had not already been using any of the multitude of filtering options that Gmail had previously provided, then this new form of organization might very well be a neat new organization tool for you.

Thanks to reader Trainer Trish (an incredibly insightful animal trainer!) for that one!

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*Before this latest rendition of Gmail, they had a new inbox feel you could either use or check an option to keep your inbox the old way.  So I had checked off the "Old inbox" format.  But that is, until they hard-coded my day, dissed my "old" option and suddenly, there I was, looking at the new format that I didn't want.

-Bruce
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