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> according to some opaque criteria that I don't get to define or tweak

Exactly this. When I saw the tabbed inbox, my first thought was, "oh, this will be cool", followed shortly by, "wait, I don't get to control or customize this at all?"

Really, why can't I define my own tabs for specific searches/labels? The black box tabs they provide now should just have been defaults within a customizable feature.

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You can customize it but the UI isn't particularly obvious. You can drag emails between tabs to teach gmail which is the most appropriate tab, you can also designate inboxes as a filter action.

Personally I think it's a great feature but one I won't be using because I already have a labyrinth of filter rules that perform the same function.

I've been surprised at how well the new tab system has been working. How could you make a filter that would sort on the broad criteria of "promotions" and "social"?

Some machine learning algorithm; it's not so different from classifying emails as spam/not spam.

He/she asked how to do it with filters.

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