Pinning emails at the top of your inbox is a good way of reminding you of important emails that need your attention. This is especially useful if you typically receive a lot of unimportant emails that clutter your inbox.
Gmail’s categories feature that automatically categorizes received emails by type (Social, Updates, Forums & Promotions) helps to declutter the inbox for important emails to stand out.
But that feature alone may not be sufficient or possible (i.e. if you prefer to disable categories) and you may instead opt to manually pin email or threads that are very important. This way, pinned emails remain at the top of the inbox even as new emails arrive.
Unfortunately, there’s no native way to pin emails in Gmail. However, there’s a workaround we can use to achieve something similar on the web (online) version of Gmail. Let’s have a look at it.
Pin Emails in Gmail Web
- Log in to your Gmail inbox and click the gear icon to reveal Quick Settings.
- Scroll down to the Inbox type section and select the Starred first option.
- Go back to the inbox and star emails or threads that you want to pin at the top.
- Next refresh your inbox. The starred emails will be pinned at the very top in a separate section called Starred.
You can unpin an email anytime by removing the star and refreshing the inbox.
Note: Setting your inbox to Starred first will disable the default category tabs (Social, Updates, Forums & Promotions). To restore them and/or disable the pinning, set the inbox type back to Default.
