Learn how to manage new email notifications in the Gmail app on your iPhone or iPad to minimize unnecessary alerts.
If you’re receiving too many unnecessary notifications from Gmail or not receiving any at all, adjust the internal notification settings within the app to strike the right balance. This way, you’ll get notified for important emails without being disturbed by spam or irrelevant messages.
Check the Gmail app notification settings
You can choose whether you want notifications from all emails, just the important ones, or none at all.
1) Open Gmail on your iPhone or iPad and tap the hamburger menu icon in the top left.
2) Tap Settings at the bottom of the left sidebar.
3) Select Email notifications to customize your Gmail notification settings and get notified for:
- All new mail: This will also include low-quality emails that don’t need your immediate attention and aren’t worthy of a notification.
- Primary only: This will ensure you get new notifications only for those emails that Gmail categorizes as Primary. It won’t include alerts for emails categorized as Promotions, Social, Forums, Updates, etc.
- High priority only: If you select this, Gmail will notify you of important emails that need your attention.
- None: You won’t get notifications for new emails you receive on this account on this device.
4) From this screen, you can also change the notification sound and pick one you like or choose none to go completely silent.
Note:
- If you’ve added more than one account to the Gmail app, follow the above steps separately for each of them.
- You can follow the above steps only for the Gmail account added to the Gmail app and not for other non-Google or IMAP accounts.
Manage Gmail notifications on the iOS level
You can further fine-tune your email notifications on the system level. This tip works for the Gmail app and all other iOS apps.
1) Open the Settings app on your iPhone and tap Notifications.
2) Scroll down and tap Gmail from the list of apps.
From here, you can customize things accordingly:
- Allow Notifications: If you turn it off, you won’t get new notifications from the Gmail app for all accounts added to it.
- Lock Screen, Notification Center, and Banners: Unchecking these will ensure that Gmail notifications will not appear on the Lock Screen, Notification Center, or as banners at the top of the screen when your iPhone is unlocked.
- Sounds: Turn it off if you don’t want the Gmail notification to play the alert tone.
- Badges: Turn it off to stop showing the red bubble with the number of unread emails over the Gmail app icon on the Home Screen.
- Show on Mac: Prevent Gmail app notifications from showing on your Mac, courtesy of iPhone Mirroring.
- Prioritize Notifications: Stop Apple Intelligence from marking Gmail notifications as important and pinning them to the Priority section on the Lock Screen.
- Summarize Notifications: Block Apple Intelligence from summarizing Gmail notification previews.
Tip: If you wear an Apple Watch, you can manage its notifications separately.
Mark emails as important and unimportant
You can help Google better understand your preferences and tweak notification alerts by marking certain senders as important or unimportant. To do that, tap the three dots icon from the top right and choose Mark as important/not important.
Move incorrect emails
Imagine you set the Gmail app to only send primary notifications (tip 1 above), but an email you receive is, in fact, a promotional email that Google could not identify.
To address this, tap the three dots icon in the top right of the email, choose Move, and then select another category, such as Promotions, Updates, or Social. In the future, Google should remember this and categorize emails from this sender accordingly.
Mark emails from a sender as spam
If you’re getting unwanted notifications from senders you never subscribed to, Gmail won’t notify you of spam emails. To address this, tap the three dots icon at the top of the email and select report spam. You can also choose to unsubscribe from their list if that’s an option or mark it as spam to stop receiving further emails from that sender.
Block spam senders
If you’re getting harassed by specific senders, you can block their conversation, which will move all future emails from them to the spam section of your Gmail account. To do this, tap the three dots icon next to the reply icon and choose Block “sender.”
Unsubscribe from mailing lists
Instead of blocking, you can go to the bottom of the email and look for an unsubscribe link. Most senders honor your request to cancel the subscription, but spammers may not, in which case, just keep blocking their email accounts.
Remember that you can also make the above changes if you use Gmail on other platforms, such as an Android phone or Google Chrome in a computer browser. For the latter, click the cog icon in the upper right section of gmail.com and select See all settings. Then, manage your Gmail notifications under General > Desktop notifications, and head to the Chat and Meet tab to make the necessary adjustments.
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