Community Messages and Your Gmail Inbox

If you’ve noticed that community-wide messages do not seem to appear in your Gmail inbox, the suggestions outlined below should help. Additionally, ITS has a host of helpful resources on Gmail in their KnowledgeBase, including more detailed information on Gmail categories and inbox tabs.

Why A Message May Not Appear In Your Inbox | How To Ensure Messages Land In Your Inbox  

Why A Message May Not Appear In Your Inbox

Email plays a vital role in keeping us connected to one another. Important community messages are first sent to your College @swarthmore.edu email address. Community messages regarding COVID-19 appear both on the Dash and on the COVID-19 site, on the Community Messages page. 

If you notice that these community messages are not appearing in your Gmail inbox, it may be because they are ending up in your Social, Promotions, or Spam tab or folder. Gmail tabs and folders, also referred to as labels, are intended as a way to organize the flow of emails you receive and reduce clutter in your main inbox. While these can be a powerful tools for organizing your inbox, some of the ways Gmail automatically sorts messages you receive into certain folders may mean you don’t see them in your inbox, and may risk you missing important news and announcements.

How to Ensure Community Messages Land in Your Inbox

To train Gmail to stop sending certain messages to your Social, Promotions, or Spam folders and instead send them to your main inbox, you will need to navigate to your Social, Promotions, or Spam tab or folder, find the message, and drag it to your inbox. Doing so will tell Gmail to direct messages from that sender to your main inbox in the future, so you will not need to look in your Social, Promotions, or Spam folder for such messages moving forward. Detailed instructions on a few ways to do this are outlined below.

To ensure you receive important community messages, please be sure that any emails coming from the following email addresses that may appear in your Social, Promotions, or Spam folders are dragged to your inbox:

If your inbox does not have tabs

If you do not see tabs across the top of your inbox, they may appear in the categories the left hand menu. If that is the case, here's how you can ensure important messages are sent to your main inbox:

  1. Scroll down the left-hand menu, which should have your Inbox at the top, until you see Categories. Note that you may have to expand this menu by clicking More.
  2. Click on Social or Promotions to see if any important messages have ended up in that folder (i.e. messages from the email addresses listed above, or from campus leadership).
    1. In some instances, you may instead see Social and Promotions folders appear horizontally at the top of your inbox, as tabs. The same drag and drop instructions below apply.
  3. The Spam folder is not within Categories, but should appear a bit above it.
  4. Once you’ve found a message you’d like to have in your inbox, simply click on it and drag it up to the word Inbox on your left, to place it there. Moving forward, this action will train Gmail to place messages from that sender directly in your main inbox.

If your inbox has tabs

The video below showcases how to move messages into your main inbox if you have Social and Promotions tabs visible across the top of your inbox.

Sorting Your Gmail Inbox