Inbox to Gmail transition. How to manage labels instead of bundles

Question

Because Google is removing its Inbox app in March 2019, I'm transitioning back to the Gmail app. Aside from its minimalist esthetics, the way Inbox managed messages via bundles versus Gmail's filtering system was a major factor in my preferring it over Gmail. Note that I partially used Gmail's filtering settings to filter messages into labels where Inbox's simpler rule set couldn't manage. I'm familiar with that system.

Now that I'm transitioning back to Gmail, I'm running into the filtering and notification differences between the apps.

Essentially: 1) in Inbox a message that's sorted into a bundle is not considered to be in the inbox and 2) Inbox only sends one notification when a new message arrives, no matter how many bundles it may be filtered into.

In contrast, 1) the Gmail app seems to attach the inbox label to all new messages and 2) the Gmail app sends a notification for each label (which has notification turned on) that a message is filtered into.

The result is that where in Inbox I only got one notification for a message that filtered into any bundle with notifications turned on, in Gmail I now get a notification for each label that attaches to a message -- including the basic inbox label which seems to apply to all. In practice, this means I frequently get two notifications or more per new message.

My intent -- and the way it works in Inbox -- is to get one notification for any new message, unless it falls into the category "alerts and updates" for general news items and monitoring of content. So: "notify me, unless ..."

How do I replicate this in Gmail?

Answer 1

In the end, what I really wanted to achieve was to separate email into those that I do and those that I don't want to be notified about. I only want to be notified when email is unusual or clearly important. I was able to do this quite easily (in the app) by going into settings\Notifications and setting Notifications = All, Notify for inbox sections = Important section only and Inbox important section notifications = Sound on. From there it was easy enough to just mark the important as important and unmark the unimportant emails if they'd been marked as important, and Google figured it out quick enough.

No interruptions except for stuff I want to know about right away. Though Google obviously sometimes guesses wrong, and something gets marked as not important. But once you hit the flag icon to manually mark something as important or create a filter manually (on the website) to mark certain email as important, that will usually work fine then on.