15

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.

Improve this question
1

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
27

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.

Improve this answer
6
  • You can also use the braille blank character "⠀", which will not be stripped by gmail and will still bring labels to the top.
    – Miguel Bartelsman
    Aug 30, 2019 at 14:35
  • 2
    Any idea what characters will drop a label to the bottom?
    – morgs32
    Nov 2, 2019 at 14:30
  • 1
    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
  • What's really annoying about label sorting in GMail is that Unicode characters don't sort according to code!
    – e40
    Feb 26 at 19:51

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.