How To Remove Categories In Gmail (The Social And Promotions Tabs)

In Gmail, it will by default sort your emails into three different categories (Primary, Social, and Promotions). A lot of people like this because it helps them to stay focused on important emails, but personally, I just find it a bit annoying and unnecessary.

But luckily, if you’re like me and don’t like having the three different categories of emails, and you want to disable them so that all your emails just go into one inbox, that’s actually quite easy to do, and in this article, I’m going to show you how it’s done.

Prefer to watch a video about how to remove the categories from Gmail? Click here.

When you disable these categories, the change will sync across Gmail on all your devices including the Gmail website for computers and the Gmail app for phones and tablets, so you’ll only need to do this once.

So it doesn’t matter whether you chose to change this setting on the website or in the app (you’ll get the same result either way), but first, I’m going to show you how to do it on the website, and later, I’ll show you how it’s done on the app.

How To Remove The Social And Promotions Categories From Gmail

To remove the social and promotions categories on the Gmail website, the first thing you’ll need to do is click on the settings icon in the top right hand corner.

And then, in the menu that appears on the side of the screen, click “See all settings”.

Now, you’ll be inside the settings of Gmail, and you’ll need to click on “Inbox” in the menu at the top of the screen.

And now, under inbox, you’ll see a checklist next to “Categories”, and in that checklist, “Social” and “Promotions” will both be ticked. So all you need to do to disable the categories is click on both those boxes to untick them.

So now, the only option in this list that’s ticked should be “Primary”.

Now, all you need to do is save these changes, and you’ll be good to go! To do that, just scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click “Save changes”.

And you’ll be automatically taken back to your inbox, and as you’ll see, the three different category labels are gone, and all your emails are now in the one place!

How To Remove The Social And Promotions Categories From The Gmail App

To remove the social and promotions categories using the Gmail app on a phone or tablet, the process is fairly similar to the website, but the app is laid out a bit differently.

The first thing you’ll need to do is tap on the menu button in the top left hand corner to expand the main menu.

And then, in the menu that appears, scroll all the way down to the bottom…

And tap on “Settings”.

Now, you’ll need to choose which account you want to do this for.

If you have multiple Gmail accounts, you can do this for each of them one at a time, but if you only have one Gmail account, or you only want to do this for one of your accounts, you’ll just need to tap on the account you want to do this for.

Now, you’ll be in the settings for your chosen account, and in the settings, you’ll need to tap on “Inbox categories”.

Now, on the next screen, you’ll see a list of different inbox categories, and the two categories “Social” and “Promotions” will be enabled.

So all you need to do now is tap on these two options to untick them.

And now, the categories will be disabled! So if you tap on the back arrow a few times to get back to your inbox, you’ll see all your emails are now in the one place!

And that’s all there is to it, so now, whether you use the Gmail website or the Gmail app, you no longer have to put up with having the three different categories, and you can just see all your emails in one place.