If you view your Gmail email in a browser, not a Mail program, you might have wondered where some of them are. Read on to help answer the question ‘Where are my emails in Gmail?’!
Sometimes an email isn’t in your inbox, although you know it should have just come in. Where did it go? Google identifies incoming email according to some default categories. If they think your email is of one of those types, for example promotional (e.g. newsletters) they will sort it into that tagged section, and remove it from the inbox.
You have some control over these settings, and we’re going to take you through the various options in this blog post.
Note: Always check your Spam folder first for missing emails!
What are the Gmail settings?
 | Click on the gear in the upper right corner of the Gmail window to open your settings. |
 | Choose how close together the entries will appear on your screen. This also controls whether you see a small preview piece of each email in the inbox. |
 | Choose background image or THEME |
 | The Default INBOX TYPE is shown below here. This view includes tabs across the top, each of which acts like a separate inbox. Your choices are Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Each of these can be turned on or off. If Primary is the only tab enabled, all incoming email will show up in your inbox. The next choices, Important first, Unread first and Starred first have to do with the ORDER your emails are displayed |
 | Priority Inbox breaks the inbox up going DOWN the page. The sections are Important and Unread, Starred, and Everything Else. You can also add a labels of your own creation to these sections. Multiple Inboxes lets you define specific criteria for sorting mail into separate inboxes. |
 | The next section determines whether and how a preview of each email will be viewed. Conversation view determines whether emails are grouped according to whether their subject lines match. Generally this will group the back and forth emails in a conversation. |
Examples of where your emails are in Gmail
Let’s look at some examples.
This is the Default inbox with Primary, Social and Promotions tabs activated. Google places incoming email in one of these three locations.
The following is an example of the Important first Inbox Type. Here you can see the two sections Important and Everything else. Depending on how much email you have in your inbox, some sections will not be visible without scrolling down the page.
The is an example of the Priority Inbox. It works much like the Important first shown above.
And the final image shows the Reading pane to the right of the inbox. All of the images above used the No split reading pane option.
Where is my email in Gmail?
We hope this gives you a little sense of where you might need to look to find your emails, based on the settings you have enabled. Going back to the Default setting with no tabs can reacclimate you.
Here is a great article from How To Geek about using Labels. Please call or email if you want additional help and we’d be happy to take you through each of these steps.