How To Pause Incoming Emails Temporarily in Gmail

Many studies show that checking emails only a few times a day reduces stress and boosts productivity. Well, easier said than done. Whether you believe or not, email is still the core communication channel for many businesses. So it’s so easy to get sidetracked by the “You’ve got a new mail” when you are trying to get something else done.

That’s why this idea of Inbox Pausing sounds very compelling. It’s a new feature introduced in Boomerang for Gmail, a popular Chrome extension that offers some pretty cool email management tools, such as Send later, Track responses, use AI to write better emails, etc.

Add Boomerang for Gmail from Chrome Web Store and go through the steps to connect the service with your Gmail account. Once all set, you will see a new Pause button added right next to the Mail icon.

Clicking the Pause button brings up a popup with a few more options.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can Turn on Auto-Responder to notify the sender you are in Pause mode and that you can’t read any emails for the time being. You have total control of what the auto-respond message is. You can choose to be either formal or funny. It’s all your choice.

You can also customize the Pause period by enabling “Unpause automatically” option and setting up the period you see fit from the drop-down menu next to the option.

Click Pause to start pausing incoming emails once you select all the settings.

Behind the scene, Inbox Pause takes advantage of the magic of the new Gmail Settings API, filters, and more other fun things to temporarily hide your emails from your Inbox and bring the back when unpaused. Your emails are still kept in your Gmail account. They are just hidden from view inside a special label the extension creates. Boomerang doesn’t store any of your emails you receive in your Gmail inbox.

The basic feature of Inbox Pause is free to use, no string attached. All you need is to add the extension to your Chrome and authorities it to access some of Gmail’s features. If you upgrade to a Pro account, you get two more features unlocked for you, whitelist senders and brings messages into inbox on a schedule.

What’s even better, the Pause works across multiple platforms, which means that if you pause your Inbox on a desktop computer, it will pause Inbox (and notifications) across ALL your devices until you unpause! So don’t be panic when you see no emails coming for the last couple of hours on your phone. That could be very well because you have paused Inbox on your desktop computer earlier.