On this page
- Protect email with confidential mode
- Label messages with sensitive content
- Know when a recipient reads your email
- Add an importance marker to a message
- Highlight an email's importance in the subject field
- Label an email urgent
- Have mail sorted by priority
Protect email with confidential mode
Need to send sensitive content to people? With confidential mode in Gmail, you can protect sensitive information from unauthorized access. Set an expiration date for messages, revoke access to messages and attachments at any time, and disable recipients' access to forward, copy, print, and download material.
Learn how at the Gmail Help Center
Label messages with sensitive content
This feature must be enabled by your administrator. If you are an admin, see Create classification labels for your organization.
Add classification labels to your email to indicate that it contains sensitive or important content. For example, if your email contains confidential information, your organization’s data policy might require that you add a “Confidential” label to the email.
Learn how at the Gmail Help Center
Know when a recipient reads your email
This feature must be enabled by your administrator. If you are an admin, see Make read receipts available to users.
If you’re sending an important email to someone, find out when they’ve opened it by setting up a read receipt. A read request is sent to every recipient in the To and Cc fields, but not to recipients in the Bcc field, mailing lists, or aliases.
Learn how
Request a read receipt
Important: To receive a read receipt in your inbox, the recipient of your email may need to approve it first.
- On your computer, open Gmail.
- Click Compose.
- Compose your email as you normally would.
- At the bottom right, click More options
Request read receipt.
- Click Send.
Return a read receipt
If you receive a message that requests a read receipt, and your organization wants you to approve it first:
- On your computer, open Gmail.
- Check your emails as you normally would.
- If a message tells you a sender has requested a read receipt, choose an option:
- To send the receipt now, click Send receipts.
- To send the receipt later, click Not now. You'll be asked to send the receipt the next time you open the message.
Tip: If someone requests a read receipt, but you don't see a message, your receipt was sent automatically.
Add an importance marker to a message
Gmail uses several signals to decide which messages to automatically mark as important. You can also add or remove importance markers, yourself.
Learn how
Use importance markers
Next to emails that Gmail thinks is important, you'll see a yellow Importance marker 
To see all your emails that are marked as important, search Gmail for is:important.
You can also click a message's importance marker to mark the message as important yourself.
Highlight an email’s importance in the subject field
Sending an urgent or time-sensitive email message to your team? Let recipients know a message needs their attention. Just add an appropriate heading to the subject of your message to highlight your request.
- Open Gmail.
- Click Compose.
- Add recipients.
- In the Subject field, add a descriptor, such as:
- [URGENT]
- [REPLY BY DEC 1]
- [APPROVAL NEEDED]
Note: You can paste in a red exclamation markbefore the descriptor to Mark email you send as important.
- Compose your message and click Send.
Label an email urgent
You can create labels in Gmail to categorize messages as urgent or important.
- Open Gmail.
- At the top right, click Settings
See all settings..
- Click the Labels tab.
- Scroll to the Labels section and click Create new label.
- Enter the label name URGENT and click Create.
Auto-label email as urgent
If you want to prioritize email from certain people, you can let Gmail filter those email addresses for you and label them accordingly.
Filter and label messages from a particular sender
- Open Gmail.
- In the search box at the top, click Show search options
.
- In the From field, enter the email address of the person whose emails you want to label.
- At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter.
- Check the box to Apply your label. Then either choose or create the label URGENT.
- Click Create filter.
Messages you receive from that sender are automatically labeled URGENT.
Have mail sorted by priority
You can also have Gmail sort and prioritize email for you. Just set up a Priority inbox. Your emails are automatically split into three sections: important and unread, starred, and everything else.
Turn on Priority inbox
- On your computer, go to Gmail.
- To configure your inbox, go to the top right, then click Settings
.
- In the "Inbox type" section, select Priority Inbox.
- To customize priority inbox setting, click Customize.
- Choose the inbox sections you want to show
Train Priority inbox
Gmail uses several signals to decide which messages to automatically mark as important, including:
- Whom you email, and how often you email them
- Which emails you open
- Which emails you reply to
- Keywords that are in emails you usually read
- Which emails you star, archive, or delete
To see why an email was marked as important, hover over the importance marker
Note: If an email was marked as important but you don't want it to be, click the importance marker
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