Set "All mail" as my default Inbox in Gmail?

Question

Is there a way to set my Gmail so that the default Inbox is "All mail"?
I mean as soon as I go to gmail.com or mail.google.com, All Mail opens up, is this possible other than specifying it in the address?

Answer 1

The address you are normally taken to is mail.google.com/#inbox. It's simply a matter of changing that mail.google.com/#inbox to mail.google.com/#all.

There currently is no way to have it go there by default. I would suggest just bookmarking https://mail.google.com/mail/#all or you could go a whole different route and use some kind of Greasemonkey script that would allow you to change where the GMail button links to.

Answer 2

You can turn use "multiple inboxes" to get all mail to the top of the window

1. Go to settings/Labs and select "Multiple inboxes"
2. Save Changes
3. You should now see a "Multiple inboxes" tab in settings.
4. GMail will let you specify a search query. In the first box enter "is:All Mail" without the quotes.
5. Set the maximum page size to a larger number. It didn't complain about using 50, but I don't know if there is a maximum value.
6. Set "Extra panels positioning" to Above the inbox. This will put the "All Mail" label above the main inbox.
7. Save changes

There may be a couple of second lag the first time you go back to the main page, because it has to execute the new query.

It does the job with a couple of issues:

• Each inbox has its own < and > button to move through the list
• Each inbox has its own "view all" button which jumps you to the label
• The gear button is only on the tool bar above the main inbox section.

Note: you will need to ensure that in Settings -> Inbox, your Inbox type is set to "Default".

Answer 3

I came across this thread when looking for a way to have all my mail displayed as a default when GMail opened as the first my browser (Chrome) showed - it used to be like that.

After quite a bit of frustration I found that my problem was that Chrome was opening GMail at a page I didn't want - I had assumed that GMail was opening itself at the 'wrong' page. I got in amongst the Chrome settings and reset the first page it displayed to the one I wanted from GMail.

Hope this helps anybody else who may have had the same problem.

Answer 4

I just used Alfred to accomplish this by using the https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#all url and creating a custom web search. Pretty easy.

Alfred is a task management app for Mac. You basically create custom commands based on keywords. For example I created a task called "gmail" and assigned the url for the inbox with All mail. So when I open up the Alfred window and type Gmail it goes to my inbox with all mail filtered.

Answer 5

1. Go to settings
2. Select Message list
3. Go to 'Organization' (How do you want your messages to be organized?)
4. Select 'Individual messages' as opposed to 'Group by conversation'

... and (assuming your problem was the same as mine, and you were being driven to distraction by Gmail having defaulted to 'Group by conversation) that should solve the problem.