Highlight an important email message

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. To avoid missing important incoming messages, set up a filter and automatically apply a label to your messages. When you get an email from someone, its importance is indicated with a yellow marker next to the sender’s name. You can also set up an inbox to prioritize email for you.

Highlight an email’s importance in the subject field

1. Open Gmail.
2. Click Compose.
3. Add recipients.
4. In the Subject field, add a descriptor, such as:
   • [URGENT]
   • [REPLY BY DEC 1]
   • [APPROVAL NEEDED]
     Note: You can add a red exclamation mark before the descriptor to Mark email you send as important.
5. Compose your message and click Send.

Label an email urgent or important

You can create labels in Gmail to automatically categorize incoming messages.

1. Open Gmail.
2. At the top right, click Settings See all settings..
3. Click the Labels tab.
4. Scroll to the Labels section and click Create new label.
5. Enter a label name, such as URGENT or IMPORTANT and click Create.

Create a filter & autolabel email urgent or important

If you want to prioritize email from certain people, you can let Gmail filter those email addresses for you and label them accordingly.

1. Open Gmail.
2. In the search box at the top, click Show search options .
3. Enter your search criteria. If you want to check that your search worked correctly, see what emails show up by clicking Search.
4. At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter.
5. Choose what you’d like the filter to do.
6. Click Create filter.

For step 5 above, apply your label. For example:
   To: your_email+urgent@your_organization.com
   For example: To: [e-mail] URGENT

You can also use Gmail filters to archive, delete, star, or automatically forward your mail.

Have mail sorted and prioritized

You can also have Gmail sort and prioritize email for you. Learn to Set up a Priority Inbox.

Google, Google Workspace, and related marks and logos are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names are trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.