How to Use Gmail’s Hidden Colored Stars to Organize Your Inbox

While there’s no doubt that a clearly organized Gmail inbox can give one a sense of order, there are other aspects, such as its Starred section, that can improve it further.

Labels can prove to be very efficient when it comes to categorizing and storing certain emails but there are important emails that can be found by Starring them. It’s much easier to access these emails too.

Of course, there’s more to Gmail than just yellow icons that are used to indicate starred emails. Accessing your Gmail settings will show you a number of colored stars such as green, blue, red, orange and purple too. If that’s not enough, you can use colored exclamation points, check marks among other items that are available.

While you can each colored star to indicate an action that you would like to take, there’s no way of personalizing each star with a particular purpose or name.

To set up this feature with Gmail, click the cog in the upper right hand corner and select Settings from the dropdown menu.

When the Settings screen opens, look for the General tab and then the Stars section that close to the top. Google’s presets that are in place include 4 stars or all stars and that should include more starred colors to you.

Also, you can drag and drop each star from the In Use to the Not In Use category when necessary. This will help you get the number of stars that you need. Of course, dragging and dropping stars from within the In Use section can be done to get the exact lineup that is necessary.

Make sure you hit Save Changes at the bottom and get back to your inbox to start using these stars.

That said, if you want to use a yellow star, then click once or just once more to get a list of colors that you can pick from. That’s it.