Here at gtricks, we have a vested interest in helping you keep your gmail account organized. From cool tips to tricks for sorting your emails, we share everything that could help simplify email management. And today, I have another cool trick for you to organize your incoming emails.
Recently, I was having a hard time keeping up with dozens of new emails every day. of which, most weren’t time sensitive, but did skip some important emails. To deal with this problem, I simply created some labels (aka folders) in gmail and filtered less important incoming emails to those labels. Now I have a clean inbox with only important messages, and I can check the less important ones just by visiting those tags.
let’s see how you can also send certain emails to a folder in gmail and organize your inbox.
create a new label (folder) in gmail
To get started, you will first need to create a label in gmail where the particular emails will be sent. this is how to create a new tag:
1. Click the “more” button in the left pane of gmail and then click “create new tag”.
2. now enter the tag name in the first text box and click “create”. make sure you enter a relevant name that matches the type of emails that will go there.
The
tag will be created and will appear in the left pane below the categories. you can repeat this process to create as many tags as you need.
filter emails to a folder in gmail
Once the folder is ready, it’s time to create a filter to automatically send emails to that folder. Before creating a filter, you must first configure the filter criteria using the gmail search option. Although you can use gmail’s search operators to create criteria, using the advanced search options form is much easier.
To access it, click the inverted arrow icon at the end of the gmail search bar. some editable fields will open where you can set the search criteria. You must complete this form according to your needs, but to make things easier, I explain what information each field requires.
From: Here you can enter the email address of one or more people whose emails you want to filter. if you don’t want to filter emails from specific people, leave this field empty.
to: This field is only useful for incoming messages if you have merged multiple email accounts and want to filter your emails separately. if that’s not the case, leave it empty.
subject: Here you can add keywords that may appear in the subject field of emails you want to send to the folder. To add multiple keywords, you’ll need to separate them with a vertical bar (|). for example, “free|review|paid”.
has the words: you can list keywords here that could appear anywhere within the email you want to filter. again, you’ll need to use a vertical bar (|) to separate multiple keywords.
does not have: You can use this field to add words that should not be filtered even if the above fields match the criteria. you want to use this particular field to prevent important emails from being filtered.
Now that you know what each field requires, you should have no problem setting up your filter criteria. just remember that you don’t have to fill in all the fields, just fill in the ones that are enough to filter the required emails. After completing the search form, click the “create filter with this search” button in the lower right corner.
here check the checkbox next to the “bypass inbox” and “apply label” options, and then choose the label from the dropdown menu next to to that.
Next, check the checkbox next to “also apply filter to matching conversations”, and then click the “create filter” button to create the filter.
Now, all your existing emails and new emails that match the filter criteria will automatically go to the folder (label) you assigned.
final words
In addition to helping me organize my inbox, I also find this trick useful for saving interesting content in gmail and automatically organizing it under tags. For example, you can create a tag for interesting articles, and whenever you find an interesting article worth reading later, just email it with appropriate filters and it will be saved to the tag.
let us know in the comments if you know of any other cool ways to organize emails in gmail.