How to Sort Gmail by Sender

Gmail has no sort-by-sender option

Your inbox is ordered by date, and Gmail doesn't offer a way to change that to sender, on the web or in the app. Labels and inbox categories split your mail into separate piles, but each pile is still in date order.

What Gmail does well is pulling up one sender at a time. What it doesn't do is tell you which senders are responsible for most of your mail, which is usually the reason people go looking for a sort button in the first place.

See every email from one sender

There are three quick ways, and they all end in the same filtered list.

1. Search with from:

2. Use the From chip

Search for anything in Gmail on the web and a row of filter chips appears under the search bar. Click From, then type a name or pick from the suggested senders. You can choose more than one sender at once.

3. Right-click an email

In your inbox list on a computer, right-click any email and choose Find emails from followed by the sender's name. Gmail runs the search for you.

Keep a sender's mail together automatically

If you want one sender to have a permanent place in the sidebar, give their mail a label with a filter:

1. Search from:name@example.com.
2. Open the search options (the sliders icon at the right of the search bar) and click Create filter.
3. Tick Apply the label and pick or create a label. Add Skip the Inbox if you don't want their mail in the inbox at all.
4. Tick Also apply filter to matching conversations to label what's already there, then click Create filter.

That gives the sender their own folder-like view. It's still in date order, and it only makes sense for the handful of senders you want to keep.

See who sends you the most

Gmail's closest thing to this is its Manage subscriptions page (More → Manage subscriptions on a computer), which lists your mailing-list senders with how many emails each has sent you recently. It only covers subscriptions and only recent mail, but it's free and built in. Our guide to unsubscribing in Gmail covers that page.

Gmailytics answers it for your whole inbox. It connects to your Gmail and ranks the senders in your inbox by how many emails they've sent you. On the Senders tab, click a column to re-sort the list by storage used, by unread share or by name. The biggest senders by size are flagged as storage hogs, and the Mostly unread chip narrows the list to senders with at least 10 emails, 90% or more of them unread.

Gmailytics reads metadata only: senders, dates, sizes, labels and read status, never subject lines or message content. It looks at your inbox, not archived mail.

Clear out one sender

Once you can see who the worst offenders are, getting rid of one is quick. In Gmail, search from: plus their address, tick the checkbox above the list, and click “Select all conversations that match this search” before you delete. Without that last click you only get the first page of results.

In Gmailytics, select one or more senders in the list and trash or archive everything from them in one action, up to 5,000 emails per sender at a time. If you only want part of a sender's mail gone, the envelope button on their row trashes just their unread, or just their read, emails.

Frequently asked questions

More Gmail cleanup guides