2008 October | Technology Help Center

Archive for October, 2008

Gmail Filters Tips and Tricks

How to set Gmail Filters?

Email filters are used to organize the emails for easy access and for later use. You can organize your email inbox in such a way that, you will never miss any important email.

Please read this post carefully, and you can really do a lot of thing using filters in Gmail. In fact this is one of the important features why most of the people love Gmail.

Gmail Filter

Click the link to get the Filter option as below

Gmail Filter View

So this is the page where you can enter the filter criteria.
If you want to Filter incoming emails based on from address, enter the address of the person who is going to send you the email. You can enter his name or the email address, I suggest you to use the email address rather than name, because there are several similar names which will confuse you later
If you want to set a filter based on to whom it was sent, you can enter that. Note: You may think, I only have 1 email address and all the emails are sent to that address so how am I going to enter my email Id to filter. I have one more post in this website which talks about multiple email address in your same ID something like blogpostdemo+test@gmail.com instead of blogpostdemo@gmail.com. These types of address are used to create filters to organize the inbox
If you know the subject of the message, you can enter a word or few words of the subject to filter the emails
If you want to filter all the emails with a word anywhere in subject or sender or receiver or body of the content, enter it in “Has the word” field
If you are looking for an email without a word enter the word in “Doesn’t have”
If you want to filter the attachments separately, check the “Has attachment” option

Gmail Filter From address

Gmail Filter To address

So enter the search or filter criteria and click “Next step”
Below image explains the overview of the other options, click the image to enlarge

Gmail Filter Options

Here you have many options to select
Once you click the “Next Step” you will get the above seen screen and Gmail also searches and bring the result at the bottom of the filter option

Gmail Option Selection

If you want the Filtered emails to skip the inbox and “archive it” choose the option “Skip the Inbox” remember, you will not find this in your inbox at all. If you choose this option , I advice you to set a Label so you can go back there and see if there is any important message.
If you want the filtered Emails to be automatically marked as read, choose the option “Mark as Read”
If you want the filtered Emails to be automatically starred, choose the option “Star it”
If you want to organize the filtered email by labelling them, choose the option “Apply the Label” and click the drop down as seen below

Gmail New Label

If you want to create a New Label click the “New Label” and you will get the pop up as below

Gmail New label

Enter the Label Name and Click OK. You can edit the label names later, if you want to rename the label
Once you create a new label you will see a confirmation as below

Gmail Label Confirmation

If you want any emails to be forwarded to a different email address, you can enter the email address in the “Forward it to” field. This is very useful if you are using more than 1 email ID and if you want to access the emails from different ID. There is also option of setting Gmail Mail fetching. I have posted that in this website, read it if you want to organize all your emails in 1 Inbox. Remember, You cannot forward an old email that is already in your inbox using the filter option. This option is applicable only to new emails
Once you finish choosing these options for your filter, Click create Filter and set the filter of your preference.
You will also have an option for assigning the filter to the existing emails in your inbox by click the “Also apply this setting to XX conversation below”
Is you go to your inbox, you will see the difference based on the filter criteria you have choosen

I suggest you to read more about Gmail Tips and Tricks that I have posted here to increase productivity

If you have any question or suggestions, please post a comment

Dave:)

Gmail Tips and Tricks Filter Using the + (Plus eMail Address)

I recently found this feature and it is very great one to organize your inbox

I have created a new Gmail or Google account for demo purpose

blogpostdemo@gmail.com

If you know how the filtering works, you can really play with this method
Sometimes we may want to have more than 1 ID to sort the emails that we recieve from various sources. You may want to give your family members a different ID and for your friends different ID.
The reason we do this is because we do not want to miss any important emails.
You can use “(+) plus” feature in Gmail
if you want to organize your friends email, you can give your friends blogpostdemo+friends@gmail.com, instead of giving the real email ID, you can add a plus sign and any other word next to the plus sign.
This will be delivered to your email ID.
Using filter option you can filter all the mails coming to “blogpostdemo+friends@gmail.com” to a separate label skipping the inbox
Instead of friends you can use any other name like family, business, school, test, exams, travel, newsletter and etc…
When you sign up for online newsletter or for any other subscription use these type of email addresses to automatically filter the incoming emails.
I am going to send an email to my own address with a +test combination. So my ID is blogpostdemo@gmail.com, and I am going to send an email to blogpostdemo+test@gmail.com and below you will see the image how it looks like

Gmail Plus Option

Here is the email in my inbox and the detailed view of sender and receviers address

Gmail Plus Option detailed View

I also want you to read how to set filters, so all the emails sent to this address is filtered

Read more about setting up Filter option here

If you have any questions, post a comment

Dave