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Is there a way to reorder labels in Gmail? There is one specific label I need to access more than the others and I would like it at the top.

I'm using Airmail 2 as my local IMAP client connected to my email running on Google Apps for Work.

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1 Answer 1

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Gmail doesn't provide a way to reorder labels. They are listed in strictly alphabetical order.

What I have done is put a relatively unobtrusive punctuation character in the front of the label. For example:

  • _followup
  • !important
  • +client

That way they flow to the top. You can do a similar thing to drop labels to the bottom, all depending on whether the character is sorted before or after letters.

For symbols that sort after letters, {|}~, (or between upper- and lower-case, [\]^_ and ` ), see ASCII on wikipedia. All the rest will sort before, matching the table ordering. This underlying bit representation gives an index number, and therefore ordering, "lexicographic", to each character.

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  • You can also use the braille blank character "⠀", which will not be stripped by gmail and will still bring labels to the top. Aug 30, 2019 at 14:35
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    Any idea what characters will drop a label to the bottom?
    – morgs32
    Nov 2, 2019 at 14:30
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    It sorts in lexicographic order, based on underlying byte sequence from ASCII. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_set Some symbols [\]^_` will be between upper and lower case, while others will sort after: {|}~. All the rest will sort before, matching the table ordering
    – mcint
    Oct 14, 2020 at 22:02
  • Under ASCII, ! should sort before _, but as far as I can tell it sorts after.
    – stannius
    Dec 30, 2021 at 16:23
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    So I tried... a lot of unicode characters. And I found a few that sort below ascii chars (although I couldn't tell what order it was in, and the vast majority of the chars I tried didn't work). Anyway, the nicest one that sorted below ascii was Ξ. Iirc the aleph character and the one that looked like sunglasses worked too, but I don't have them up anymore or I'd paste them too.
    – Patrick
    Apr 28, 2022 at 21:49

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