Email inboxes often get cluttered after a while between spam, notifications, and, if you're a staff member, mailing lists and more. Here are some quick tips for keeping your inbox clean:

General tips

Here are a couple of basic tips you can follow to keep your email clean:

• Using the unsubscribe button on an email works most of the time, even though it can be a challenge to keep up with spam.
• Selecting the Report as Spam option will also help in the long term. If you're on a school account, it will also flag the email for us to block.
• The Archive button can be used to remove an email from your inbox while keeping it on your account. You can still find it under All Mail or by searching for it.

Adjust Canvas notifications

The first tip isn't actually performed in your email, but can be a great help to keeping organized. By default, Canvas sends a veritable slew of notifications for all sorts of things in your classes, but you can change this like so:

Click your Account picture on the left, then select Notifications:

From here, you're given the option to choose exactly what you're notified about and when by clicking the icon on each category. We recommend keeping immediate notifications for Announcements, Submission Comments, and Conversation Messages, as these can be important and aren't sent too often. Setting other categories, like Grading, to a weekly summary can massively reduce email spam, however.

Label and sort incoming messages

Gmail has a lot of functionality to help with sorting a busy inbox, namely Labels. These appear on the left sidebar, and you can add more by clicking the + (plus) button. Then, you can right click messages and choose Move to... to move them to a given label:

If you always want to sort messages from a given sender like this, e.g. Canvas notifications, select the Find emails from... option, then create a filter to apply the label and optionally skip the inbox (choosing whether or not to skip the inbox determines whether it shows up in your main inbox in addition to the label on the left):

Advanced settings

For staff members or possibly students with very busy inboxes, here are some other things you can change by clicking the settings gear in the upper right, then clicking See all settings:

• On the General tab, set Personal level indicators to Show indicators to mark messages sent directly to you with small arrows, so you can tell them apart from mailing list messages.
• Also on the General tab, choose different Stars to be available for quick, colorful categorization.
• Go to the Filters and blocked addresses tab to manage the filters defined above.