Keeping your emails sorted in your gmail account can be tedious, but gmail offers several ways to organize your emails based on different criteria. sometimes you would experience certain emails ending up in folders where they shouldn’t be and causing you to miss important updates. then, you have tried to manually move them (one after another) from one folder to another, and it seems stressful or complicated. If this situation sounds familiar to you, you’ll be looking for an automated way to accomplish this. So, here is the solution to automatically send emails to a specific folder in gmail. If you also use Outlook, please see our article on how to receive emails in specific folders in Outlook.
automatically move emails to a specific folder in gmail
Before proceeding, you need to understand two terms in gmail: filter and tag. Unlike other email services like Outlook, Gmail calls folder names as labels and rules as filters. The whole process is to create a filter that indicates the emails (based on sender or subject information) that you would like to receive in a specific folder. it could be a custom folder or one of the already existing gmail folders. follow this guide to do this on your account:
create email filters in gmail
Filters create rules for organizing your existing or future emails. log in to your gmail account and from the home panel move your cursor to the top right corner and click the “gear” icon that has the title “settings” when you hover over it.
A “quick settings” sidebar menu will appear, then click the “view all settings” sidebar button. From the dashboard that appears, click the “filters and blocked addresses” menu tab at the top.
touch the “create a new filter” text link and a dashboard to fill in your filter details or criteria popups. here is the description of the following options to consider in the filter;
- from: Enter the email senders and separate them with a comma if there is more than one.
- to: Enter the email from your account as a recipient here.
- subject: Certain words that you may remember come with the mail from the sender.
- includes the words: specifies exact keywords that should be in the subject line.
- does not have: identifies words that should not be in the subject line.
- size: the volume of mail to order larger or smaller than a particular unit in mb.
- has attachments/does not include chats: to mark and check if the mail should come with these elements or not.
once you enter these details, click the ‘search’ button to test if these criteria exist in your email before clicking the ‘create filter’ button.
configuration filter based on sender or subject & move emails
Most of the criteria in use are the sender or the subject line filter option, and that’s our case study. enter the email address(es) of your favorite sender(s) or your usual subject lines (if you can remember them), as shown in our instance here.
press the “create filter” button and a panel will appear with many options to accompany your filter. just check the one with the title “apply tag:” and click the “choose tag…” dropdown menu.
Choose an existing custom gmail folder or create a new one by clicking the “new label…” option menu. enter the label or name of the folder, and choose whether you want it to be under another folder or stand alone. tap the “create” button and continue afterwards.
With the specific custom folder as where you want to send emails that exactly match your filter, you can select “also apply filter to conversations that don’t match” for existing emails and leave other criteria.
click the “create filter” button and a message will appear indicating that the filter was successful. check the new tag and you will see that the already existing emails from your sender (with subject line) are there, and all incoming emails will go there automatically.
summarize
As you can see, it is very easy to create a folder and organize your emails to receive them in the folder automatically. you can explore various other filters available in gmail to use them. this will help keep important emails from your manager or client in a specific folder and you will be able to quickly find new emails directly by searching the folder. You can use the “categorize as…” option during filter setup if you want to use default folders (main, social, updates, forums, and promotions) in gmail instead of a custom one as used in this guide.