Fixing or removing a label

Auto Labels sorts every email into the right category automatically. It gets it right most of the time, but when it doesn’t, you can correct it. How you correct it depends on whether the label was applied by Chiefy or created by you.

How Chiefy applies labels

Chiefy applies its categories — Action needed, Awaiting reply, Notification, Promotions, and the rest — automatically as your mail arrives. These show up as labels in Gmail or categories in Outlook, exactly like any other label.

Each time Chiefy re-reads a thread, it decides the category fresh from what’s in the email. It doesn’t keep a memory of edits you made by hand. That matters for how a correction behaves, so it’s worth knowing before you start.

Fix a miscategorized email

If Chiefy filed an email under the wrong category, the fix is simply to remove that label the way you’d remove any label.

1. Open the email

   Open the thread that’s in the wrong category.

2. Remove the label A

   In Gmail, remove the Chiefy label from the thread. In Outlook, remove the category. The email is no longer filed under that category.

   Gmail · Inbox

   ST A Stripe 7:30 AM Your payout is on the way A payout of €1,240.00 is on its way to your… Action needed

One thing to know. Removing the label corrects this email now, but Chiefy doesn’t treat it as a rule. The next time a new message lands on that same thread, Chiefy re-reads it from scratch and may apply a category again based on what it sees.

For the same reason, don’t try to fix a wrong category by swapping in a different Chiefy label by hand. Chiefy’s labels are managed automatically, so the next analysis will overwrite your choice with its own prediction. Removing the wrong label is the right move; replacing it isn’t.

Your own labels work differently

Any labels you create yourself are entirely yours. Add them to a thread or remove them whenever you like — Chiefy leaves them alone. They sit independently of Chiefy’s categories, so the two never overwrite each other.

That means you can keep an email in one of your own labels and a Chiefy category at the same time, and moving an email between your own labels is just ordinary label work in Gmail or Outlook.

The one place to be careful is Chiefy’s own categories: because those are managed automatically, moving an email into or out of them by hand won’t stick the way it does with your own labels.

When the same kind of email keeps landing wrong

If a particular sender or type of email is repeatedly filed under the wrong category, correcting each one by hand gets tedious. The setting that helps most is whether a category stays in your inbox:

• If the problem is that an email keeps getting archived (or keeps staying in your inbox when you’d rather it didn’t), adjust the Keep in inbox setting for that category — see How Auto Labels works.

Chiefy’s eight categories — Action needed, Awaiting reply, Notification, Promotions, and the rest — are managed automatically, and their matching rules aren’t something you edit. So the lever you have is whether each category stays in your inbox, not how Chiefy decides what goes where.

If something is still landing in the wrong place after that, you can always turn Auto Labels off — see Turning off Auto Labels.