How do I stop Gmail from hiding emails?

The problem with using Gmail is that it doesn't always show all your messages when you're scrolling through them — even if they are right there under "All Mail."

This isn't because Google's doing anything malicious — there aren't any viruses or malware hidden inside your account — but rather because certain messages don't have enough space for formatting (such as long articles) so instead of showing the whole message, Gmail cuts off part of it. It then puts those cut-off parts into another tab called All Mail, which shows up at the top of your screen. When you click on your Inbox link, it'll take you straight to that tab where you can see everything again. But what happens if you want to go back to seeing just one specific piece of information out of an article or other type of lengthy communication? You might not be able to find it without going through each individual thread manually.

It gets worse. If you look closely at how Gmail presents things, you may notice that some labels appear above others based solely on their length. For example, clicking on New Messages will bring up every single new email sent since you last checked your Inbox, while Old Messages will only show new ones older than 30 days (and maybe even include duplicates). Clicking on either won't immediately display all the recent activity though, unless you choose Labels view first. The same goes for conversations — if you've got a conversation between two people about something important, such as work or school, both of them should get equal representation (which is why it's best to use filters instead of labels), yet you could end up missing out on crucial details by simply choosing Conversations view before opening a particular thread.

When you scroll down past these tabs in order to read entire messages, you run into the same issue: Certain emails are chopped short due to limited space. As a result, you miss vital context around whatever it was you were trying to figure out in the first place.

To make matters worse, Gmail also has its own set of problems. Most notably, it strips away tags like bold and italics from hyperlinked words, making links less visible. Some users report being unable to copy text from images in emails, meaning they must now resort to screenshots or web apps to grab a screenshot of a photo someone else attached. And sometimes, attachments themselves disappear completely.

If you think you've been subject to any of these issues recently, here's how to fix it.

How do I unhide a label in Gmail?

First thing's first, let's talk about labelling. While most users would probably prefer a simpler way of sorting their mail, most often we put too much importance on having our folders organized perfectly. We spend more time trying to perfect our folder structure than actually reading our mails! Don't worry, once you learn how to navigate Gmail effectively, you'll realize that putting labels first makes sense. Let me explain further...

Labels allow us to group similar types of incoming mail together, whether it's personal correspondence, promotional offers, bill payments, etc., and sort them accordingly. Once you start organising your mail better, you'll soon realise how useful labels become. They help you filter and process your incoming mail faster, giving you more room to breathe and focus on getting actual tasks done.

Once you understand labels' power, you'll want to try creating new ones whenever possible. To create a new label, hover over the More icon next to the search bar in the upper righthand corner of Gmail until a pop-up menu appears. Select Create Label and give it a name. Then select Add Tabs and drag the newly created label onto your Inbox tab. Afterward, you should see your new label appear within the sidebar itself. Now, whenever you come across an item that needs extra attention, you can easily add it to said label by selecting the appropriate tab and hovering over the relevant label. Repeat this step for as many additional labels as you'd like.

How do I keep the left side of my Gmail open?

While the ability to switch between different views quickly via keyboard shortcuts is nice, nothing beats having quick access to all features from the main panel. Here's how to do that: Go to Settings & General Controls & Keyboard Shortcuts and enable Use Ctrl + Tab/Cmd+Tab to Switch Between Active Windows.

Do note that this setting applies to Chrome OS, Macs, Linux machines running GNOME Shell, and PCs with Microsoft Edge installed. So if you happen to use Safari on macOS or Firefox on Linux, you'll need to change the shortcut settings yourself.

Why have my emails disappeared from my Gmail inbox?

You might have noticed that after applying the solutions mentioned earlier, certain messages no longer appeared in your Gmail inbox. That's fine, but it does mean that those messages didn't technically move anywhere. Instead, Gmail clipped them.

Clipping refers to cutting off part of a sentence or paragraph to fit into a given window size. Think of clipping photos online — if you upload a picture larger than Instagram's dimensions, it'll be cropped into squares. Clipped items generally still exist on servers, but are invisible outside of the original source. Since Gmail doesn't automatically resize images uploaded by anyone except you, it ends up treating them exactly the same way.

In essence, clipping breaks the normal flow of sentences and paragraphs. It disrupts the rhythm of speech and prevents readers from understanding full context surrounding a word or phrase. On websites, this means you lose track of where you are within an article, forcing you to constantly check backlinks and menus to reorientate yourself. On social media sites, it takes away key information and leaves you feeling frustrated and confused. Thankfully, this is easy to avoid. Just remember that when uploading large files, you should compress them first (e.g. reduce quality).

How do I restore my Gmail inbox?

After fixing the aforementioned problems, you'll likely notice that your emails have returned to their previous state. However, if you ever decide to delete your accounts entirely, you might feel inclined to erase your old messages. Unfortunately, deleting messages does cause them to vanish forever, never to return. Fortunately, you can undo this action, provided you haven't already deleted them. Simply visit My Account & Manage Your Subscriptions and mark Delete Unsubscribe Message option to Never send you an unsubscribe request.

Now that you know how to deal with Gmail's shortcomings, hopefully you'll enjoy a better experience navigating through your inboxes. For future reference, you may wish to bookmark this guide or save it somewhere accessible to refer back to later. Good luck!

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If you use Gmail as your primary email service provider or are a power user of Google's web apps, then chances are that at some point in time you've found yourself frustrated by how much information is clipped out when an e-mail message is sent through it — specifically with regard to images.

In other words, if someone sends you an image via Gmail (or any other service), most of what you see will be stripped down to links to text for download. If there are multiple attachments, they'll also likely all be cut off and labeled "image1," "image2" etc. The result is that you won't always know where to look to figure out exactly which attachment goes with which file.

You might not even realize it happened until you open up one of those attached files in another application, only to discover that none of them actually contain anything but tiny thumbnails. You're left scrolling back and forth across hundreds of lines just trying to track everything down. It's frustrating.

This isn't limited to newbie users either. We have long been accustomed to seeing lots of useful information removed when we send mail. For example, I often include URLs in my subject line so that I don't need to type them every single time I respond to a question over IM. When sending mail using Gmail, however, these URLs get clipped because they exceed the character limit. So instead of seeing the link like normal, I tend to end up clicking the URL and having no idea what it points to. And sometimes I'm really annoyed about it.

I think part of the reason why people tolerate clipping email content is that many services take advantage of this behavior by automatically stripping images, videos, charts and similar graphics from their pages. In fact, YouTube itself has started doing this too. But this sort of automatic removal doesn't make sense when applied indiscriminately since such material can add value to certain types of correspondence.

For example, consider a situation where two people are collaborating on a document together online. One person may want to provide photos while the other wants to share video footage. A clip would remove valuable context from both parties. Plus, a significant amount of work gets done each day simply due to the number of times people copy/paste large chunks of code into documents. Making things easier for everyone involved could go a long way toward making our digital world less annoying overall.

So here's the good news: you don't have to put up with this nonsense anymore! All you need to do is enable a setting called 'Minify Images' inside Gmail's General Settings menu. Once enabled, your browser should display full size versions of all images sent through your account without any loss of quality. Additionally, if you ever decide to disable this feature, you can quickly reenable it again whenever needed. Just head into Gmail settings and select Labs from the dropdown menu under Show Advanced Features. Then scroll down to Labels & Filters - Image Previews and check the box next to Enable minification of images. Click Save Changes and enjoy all of your images unfiltered!

Here's a quick walkthrough of how to turn on this feature. First, log into your Gmail account. Next, click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen. Choose Settings from the list. Select the first option labelled General. Scroll down to the section titled Labels and filters and you'll find the labelling options listed underneath. Pick the top tab labelled Basic filtering. Underneath this heading, you'll see three radio buttons. Check the appropriate one according to whether you'd like to apply different rules based upon incoming labels, keywords or both. Finally, choose Apply changes immediately from the bottom of the page. Now you're set up to start enjoying your filtered images within Gmail.

Now let's talk about why Gmail hides some emails.

Why does Gmail hide some emails?

One of the reasons behind Gmail's behaviour lies in its design principles. From a usability standpoint, Gmail strives to give users access to as little extraneous data as possible. Because of this, its designers opted to strip away unnecessary elements in order to streamline the interface. As a result, people who rely heavily on visual cues to process sentences will probably feel frustrated when they come across something that was once clearly visible now appears chopped up into small pieces.

When dealing with lengthy missives, this issue becomes particularly pronounced. Take, for instance, the following sentence typed directly into the body of an outgoing e-mail:

"Hello [name], thank you very much for contacting us today regarding opening a new savings account with us. Before moving forward with the application process, please complete form YZ123."

The message above contains several important details. Specifically, notice how it includes a table delineated by square brackets indicating sections of the same paragraph. Also included are the names of the sender and recipient(s) of the message, along with the specific contact method used (e.g., phone call). The last thing mentioned in the block quote is a hyperlink that takes viewers straight to the relevant PDF form. What happens when one opens this particular email though is that the entire chunk of text disappears after being shortened. Users are left wondering where that whole section went. They must scroll horizontally on a horizontal monitor to locate it.

A key takeaway is that when people receive lengthy emails, they usually scan paragraphs looking for patterns rather than reading individual sentences. As a result, removing crucial bits of information from emails makes perfect sense from a usability perspective. However, cutting these kinds of snippets out on a per-message basis can cause problems.

Another problem arises when recipients try to attach a file containing clipped email content. Unfortunately, this tends to happen quite frequently when people attempt to upload huge Excel spreadsheets. Not only are large portions of the spreadsheet likely to disappear, but the recipient may also be unable to tell where an attachment ends and the rest of the email begins. This leaves them confused and potentially irritated.

Finally, there is a third kind of problem that occurs when people accidentally delete sensitive information contained within an email before archiving it. Consider this scenario: Sarah receives an email from her friend Alice asking her to pick up dinner ingredients from a local market the following evening. After she reads the message, Sarah realizes that she needs to cancel plans with friends in order to meet up with Alice later that night. She deletes the original message without thinking twice about it. Later, Bob sees his inbox and notices that he received an unusual email from Alice. Curious, he clicks Reply to read it. To his surprise, he finds himself staring blankly at a truncated version of Sarah's response. He assumes that he mistakenly clicked Reply on the wrong email, so he moves onto the next message in his queue. Instead, he continues searching for clues amongst the remaining text. Eventually, Bob discovers that the missing piece of text came from Sarah's reply and figures out that he deleted it by accident. Unbeknownst to him, he had already replied to it earlier that morning. Upon further inspection, Bob spots a few stray characters at the end of the message that were originally sent by Alice. Realizing that the shortening algorithm may have clipped the email, Bob proceeds to manually expand the contents of the message. By the time he finishes, Bob spends 30 minutes hunting around for the missing bit of text -- and it wasn't anywhere close to the beginning of the e-mail thread.

While this seems extremely unlikely, it illustrates how easy it is to lose track of critical information in an archived email. Thankfully, Gmail provides tools for undoing this kind of accidental deletion. Simply visit the Trash folder of your inbox and search for the email in question. Right below it, you should see a button labelled Restore Previous Version. Hit that button, enter the email address of the sender, confirm your choice, and wait a moment. Within seconds, you'll see the entire message appear anew.

How do I find my hidden emails on Gmail?

To help deal with this issue, we recently added an Email Clipper extension that allows you to view previously clipped parts of any given e-mail. Here's how to activate it: Go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions/emailclipper to browse Chrome Web Store for extensions related to this topic. Install the free Email Clipper extension.

Once installed, the tool should show up as a new icon near the bottom of your Gmail window. Whenever you receive a new message, the extension will highlight the portion of the email that it thinks should remain intact. At the top of the highlighted snippet, you should see a blue bar that indicates how much space remains available. Below this area, you'll spot a greyed out section that corresponds to the clipped text. Hover over this area to reveal the remainder of the message. While viewing this preview, remember that you can press Ctrl + Shift + C to copy the text to the clipboard. Alternatively, right-click on the highlighted segment and choose Copy Link Address. Lastly, to save a copy of the email for future reference, you can hit the Save Button located at the top of the popup pane.

What's great about this extension is that it works perfectly well even when the aforementioned Minimize Images lab setting is turned on. Therefore, it gives you peace of mind knowing that you aren't going to overlook vital information because it got shortened.

We've all been there — you're composing an important message that's a few paragraphs long when suddenly it cuts out at the end with "Email could not be sent." You open up your inbox to see what happened and... nothing! The entire message is gone.

It turns out the person who wrote the email didn't send it before closing their browser window or tab, so Gmail clipped the last paragraph of the email as part of its automatic compression feature. It hides those messages without any way for you to access them. And if they don't respond right away, then you'll never get the chance to read it because the email will eventually disappear into oblivion.

This isn’t just annoying but also potentially dangerous since it means you might lose track of some critical information. For example, maybe someone emailed you about an issue with your product and instead of being able to reply directly, you have no idea whether they received your response. In fact, sometimes people use these types of tools to steal sensitive data like credit card numbers.

To avoid such incidents, we recommend disabling Gmail's clipping tool. Here are three ways to accomplish this task.

How do I unhide emails in Gmail?

If you want to unhide a previously clipped email (or multiple ones), first make sure you have unclipped them by opening one of the affected messages and clicking More " Unhide All. Then click the downward-facing arrow next to Show original view and choose either Always show complete version or Only when viewing page source.

You should now see the full text of the message appear in your primary mailbox. If only parts of it appeared, check the status bar at the bottom of your screen to find out why. Sometimes, the reason has something to do with how many times the same clip was downloaded. To fix it, go back to the settings mentioned above where you chose Complete version always and hit Save Changes again. Now try sending another email.

The method works even better if you change the setting to When visiting web pages and then apply it to individual messages whenever needed. However, please note that doing so may cause problems with other services depending on which sites you visit often.

For example, changing this option to When visiting web pages may break Google Translate, while switching to When browsing images may affect image recognition features used by Google Lens. We suggest testing the new options yourself and seeing how well they work for you.

In case everything goes smoothly, continue reading to learn how to disable Gmail's clipping tool altogether.

How do I unhide hidden emails?

Sometimes, the best solution is not finding a workaround but simply removing the glitch itself completely. Thankfully, Gmail lets users easily remove unwanted features through Settings " Labs. Clicking Remove under Clipping removes both the clipping process and the related toolbar menu item.

However, if you'd rather disable it entirely, here's how to do that too. Go to Gmail's Preferences, select Web Browser Behavior, scroll down until you reach Compression Tools and set it to Disabled. Then save changes and restart your browser.

Now when you compose a new email, you won't need to worry about it getting cut off halfway due to clipper issues.

How do I turn off auto hide in Gmail?

Like most things in life, turning something off is easier than enabling it, and in our opinion, this applies to Gmail's Auto Hide Feature. While it does help reduce clutter, it can also introduce additional complications.

First, let me explain how auto hide actually works. Once you receive an incoming email, Gmail automatically compresses certain elements within each message based on predefined rules. These elements include links, attachments, tables, code blocks, etc., and can make the resulting file much smaller in size.

While this makes sense in theory, it can result in several downsides. One major problem is that it strips URLs from hyperlinks, causing broken links inside emails. Another annoyance is that it creates unnecessary junk code inside files with attached media, making it harder to browse through attachments later. Finally, it can mess with formatting.

Since Gmail doesn't allow users to customize these default rules, it's likely that your mail client displays different contents every time you load a particular message. That's because the compressed versions of various snippets vary widely between recipients. As a result, one user may experience serious performance issues, while others wouldn't notice anything wrong.

There's really no easy answer to this dilemma. On one hand, you could manually enable compression for specific messages. But then you run the risk of introducing errors when reopening old messages. Alternatively, you could leave the compression enabled, but then you won't benefit from any improvements.

That said, if you decide to take matters into your own hands, below is step-by-step guide showing how to tweak the settings to your liking. First, head over to Gmail's Preferences and select General. Scroll down until you come across Advanced Features section. There, look for Labels and Filters. Hit Manage Labels and create a label called NoCompress. Under Filters, add a filter named Subject line contains NoClip subject name. Next, switch the Filter Options dropdown box from Global to Current Mailbox. Lastly, mark the Apply filters to current mailbox radio button.

Next, return to the aforementioned preferences pane. Head straight to Web Browser Behavior. Find the Compressing Content heading there and click Edit. From the list of available options, pick Off. After saving changes, quit Chrome and relaunch it. Your inbox should no longer compress emails and thus contain fewer junk codes.

How do I keep my folders visible in Gmail?

Whether you prefer using labels or creating custom folders, you probably know that organizing your mails becomes challenging once you start receiving hundreds of emails per day. Luckily, Gmail offers a simple trick to help you manage large amounts of correspondence. Simply drag and drop any folder onto the top of the main panel. Doing so ensures that it stays visible despite having a lot less space compared to larger folders.

Of course, not everyone likes this approach since it requires extra effort. Therefore, if you still wish to stick with standard folders, here's how to make them stay visible in Gmail.

Open Gmail's Preferences and navigate to the Accounts & Import tab. Select Signin & security followed by Customize your sign-in experience. Scroll down until you discover a section labeled Security and Privacy. Switch to the sidebar navigation and expand View advanced settings. In the resulting dialog box, locate and highlight Customizing your inbox. Set Use Folders underneath Primary Label field to Yes. Also, mark Automatically sort similar messages into categories and Sort messages according to sender address fields.

Afterwards, refresh your inbox and check if the desired effect took place.