Gmail arrow, what is that?

The mystery arrow in the inbox

Every time I logged into Gmail back in 2008, the first thing I saw was this:

What is it? What is it pointing to? What does it mean? Clicking on it does nothing. Not even a tooltip explaining what it is. When I wrote this post I didn’t have much to say about it, because at the time I genuinely didn’t know what it was. I knew it had to mean something — my point was that it wasn’t easy to figure out what.

The answer: personal level indicators

The mystery solved itself a few months later: the arrow is Gmail’s personal level indicator, a feature Google had announced back in March 2008. The arrows sit next to each message and show how personally it was addressed:

• » (double arrow) — the mail was sent just to you.
• › (single arrow) — sent to you and other people too.
• no arrow — you got it from a mailing list (or were BCC’d en masse).

A small thing, but handy for triage: a double arrow usually warrants a reply, while a flood of arrow-less mail is almost certainly list traffic. The feature is still there today under Settings → General → “Personal level indicators”, where you can show or hide the arrows — though Gmail’s modern interface is so differently laid out that most people never notice them anymore.