How to Customize Swipe Gestures in Mail, Gmail, and Inbox
To be honest, I’m not sure what the different swipes do in your favorite email app, because each app is slightly different. And you might not like the way your favorite email application handles swiping. You may prefer to delete messages rather than archive them; maybe you just like to swipe in one direction over another.
Luckily, you don’t have to live with the default app options for swipe gestures – if the app is any good. Today we’ll take a look at the default mail apps for iOS and Android, as well as a bonus app, Google Inbox, for those who like a different organization for their many messages.
Mail (iOS)
By default, swiping right in Apple’s default email app marks messages as read or unread. By swiping slightly to the left, you will access the More menu, and clicking on it brings up an additional menu that allows you to choose one of several options: Reply; Forward; Mark (mark the message, mark it as read, or move it to the junk mail folder); Notify me (to be notified whenever someone replies to the mailing list); and Move Message (which allows you to drag the email to any other folder you want). A small swipe also gives you the ability to tap fields to flag or archive a message, and a long swipe will automatically archive it for you.
To change these scrolling options, tap the iOS Settings app and scroll down until you see the Mail option. Click on this. Find the Swipe Options option in the Message List section and click on it. You don’t have much choice, but you can at least set the middle block, which appears when you swipe left a few times (by default, this is a flag), or the action that occurs when you swipe all the way to the right.
Gmail
On iOS, swipe right on a message in the Gmail app to delete it. swipe left on a message to delete it. No matter how you slide your finger across the screen, you delete the message. At least that’s how I set up my application. To go from deleting to archiving, the only other setting you can do is tap the hamburger icon in the upper left corner of Gmail. From there, scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar until you find Settings. Click on it, click on your account at the top and click on “When deleting messages, I prefer …”. Select “Archive” or “Move to Trash” depending on your preference.
On Android, you get a little more love from Google. Click on the hamburger icon in Gmail (in the upper left corner) and click on “Settings” at the very bottom of the sidebar. Click on General Settings and then click on Swipe Actions. You can now assign individual actions to scroll left or right, including archiving messages, deleting messages, or snoozing messages.
Inbox
Are you a fan of Google’s other email app? If so, you will find a read setting similar to that of Gmail. On iOS, the app by default marks emails as “done” when you swipe right, and lets you set a snooze timer to bring them back to your inbox if you swipe left. You can’t tweak the latter, but you can at least tweak the former (a little).
As before, click on the hamburger icon in the upper left corner of the app, scroll to the bottom of the sidebar and click on Settings. Click on your account, then click on “When deleting messages, I prefer …”. You can choose to mark messages complete as indicated, or delete them entirely from your inbox. The choice is yours – and it’s the only choice you get.
Interestingly, when I installed Inbox on Android , by default it would delete messages by swiping to the right instead of marking them as “done”. As before, you can customize this by clicking on the hamburger icon in the upper left corner of the app, clicking on “Settings”, clicking on your account and clicking on the option “When deleting messages, I prefer …”. You still only have to “do” or “delete” to play, but that’s something, isn’t it?