Guidelines for Guaranteeing Your Significant Emails Get Noticed on Gmail, Tips by Tech Expert at ZDNet

Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET

Recently I needed to send an email of rather high importance to someone. It’s pretty rare when I do such a thing simply because when a particular communication is that important I’d much rather handle the matter over the phone. Call me old-fashioned that way.

I was using Apple Mail, and found a pretty simple way to set the priority for the email. To test the feature, I sent myself a sample email set to Highest priority.

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Let me tell you that Gmail isn’t nearly as good at this as it thinks it is. I’ve missed many an important missive because it wound up in the Updates folder or was just buried in my inbox with zero indication of its importance. There is a Gmail add-on, called Priority Matrix , that lets you prioritize emails, but it’s not free, and it’s not reliable or user-friendly enough for me to recommend. And you can’t insist your Gmail recipients install the addon.

If you’re a Gmail user, what can you do? What about if you need to email Gmail users? I have a few tips.

How to notate that an email is a priority for a Gmail user

When I have to send an important email from Gmail, I typically will add something like this to the subject:

***URGENT:

I know, it’s a rather analog fix for a very digital problem. It doesn’t guarantee that an email will be marked important, but it’s your best bet.

Other options to prepend to the subject could be

***Important:
!!URGENT!!:
***RESPOND ASAP:
!!!:
*!*!RESPONSE NEEDED:

I’m in a situation where I have to bounce between Gmail, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail. When I need to mark an email with a high priority, I make sure to use either Thunderbird or Apple Mail. If the email I’m sending is to a Gmail user, I’ll tweak the subject to indicate the missive needs to be read ASAP.

Who knows, maybe someday Google will see the error of its ways and allow users to mark and view an email as high priority. Until that day, we’ll do what we can to ensure recipients understand the importance of our communiqués.