If your Gmail account is pretty active, it can make notifications on your phone about every incoming email quite annoying. Between the icon in the top bar and a sound notification with each one, you might turn notifications off all together. A better way to handle the problem is to ensure you only get notifications for messages that you care about. Fortunately, the Gmail app on Android has enough smarts in it to make this possible.
The first step is to log into Gmail on the web. Create your label under Settings and the ‘Labels’ tab. Next create a filter to apply the label to the messages you care about under Settings and the ‘Filters and Blocked Addresses’ tab. Your filter can key off of a subject line, a sender, or any other criteria but the action needs to be to ‘Apply the label’ with your new label selected. For example, I might label every email from my wife based on it coming from her email address and apply the label ‘Wife’ to her messages.
Next, we hop over to the Gmail app on Android.
Tap the hamburger menu button and scroll down to settings. On the next screen, select the email account you are configuring. Next, tap ‘Manage labels’.
On the next screen, all of the labels on your account will be listed. Tap on the new label that you created earlier.
Tap on ‘Sync messages’ and change it from ‘Sync:None’ to either ‘All’. If you’re concerned about storage, you can go with ‘Last 30 days’.
More options will appear on the screen now. Make sure ‘Label notifications’ is checked. You can also select whether you want a particular ringtone or vibration for this label.
You can repeat this for as many labels as you want to receive notifications.
Now back up one screen to the list of all labels and select the Inbox label. Uncheck the ‘Label notifications’ box for the Inbox label. This step ensures that you do not receive notifications for every incoming email, just the other labels that you selected in the earlier steps. Now your Gmail notifications should only trigger when your filters apply the label. You can create more filters and labels or tweak your filters as necessary to ensure you’re not missing any important messages but not being annoyed by the others.