Multiple inboxes in Gmail without default inbox

Question

I have two email addresses, user@gmail.com and user@university.edu.

I have set up Gmail's Multiple Inboxes, with the following criteria:

University --> label:(university inbox)
gmail --> label:(inbox -university)

This gives me two complementary sections, where archiving will also remove the email from my inbox page (which is what I'd like).

However, I still have a third section in my inbox, which contains both University and Gmail. Is there a way to remove this section?

Answer 1

Not sure if you could remove it, but you can auto-archive everything that comes in and then it'll only show up in your other inboxes.

Answer 2

under settings/multiple inboxes there is the Extra panels positioning section.

You can specify:

• Right side of the inbox
• Above the inbox
• Below the inbox

setting above the inbox will force the main inbox to the bottom, below the extra inboxes, where it will be less noticeable.

Note: if you do this, the gear icon appears at the top of the main inbox section, you will have to scroll down and find it.

Answer 3

If you don't mind the horizontal split then you can switch from multiple inboxes feature to priority inbox:

university label --> deliveredto:user@university.edu OR __additional_rule_here__
primary label --> has:nouserlabels

Labels are applied to messages, not conversations. That's why you need this __additional_rule_here__ above which must match all the following messages inside conversation. Examples: from:user@university.edu or subject:"_ac_" where _ac_ is a special prefix prepended to subject by your email server, mailing list or a google group ([ac] or :ac: won't work because []: are special symbols that are ignored in a search query if I get it right).

Then in the inbox settings:

1. All primary (shows all messages with primary label)
2. Empty
3. Empty
4. Everything else

When creating filters it may be useful to apply it to all existing emails.