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A Guide to Setting Up Gmail Filters

by James Duffell

Google Gmail filters are the primary tool I use for automatically organising my emails, ensuring I don’t waste time with emails that don’t need my urgent attention.

Why not spam emails?

It’s not always practical to spam an email especially when you receive different contents from the same email address, plus spamming is still an action meaning I’d still need to take action each time contents comes through.

What does a filter do differently?

As I said simply blocking an email address isn’t always appropriate, for example if I receive emails from a service regarding critical updates, yet the service also sends me recaps which aren’t particulay useful and without a way of deactivating these my emails can build up fairly rapidly with content I don’t have any interest in. When several services function in a similar way this can then become a bigger problem with my inbox being flooded. The good thing is most of these service send out automated messages which use a template with certain repetitive content, giving me a handle to filter them.

The repetitive nature of automated emails more often than not mean you’ll see a repetitive subject line, or even intro / closing text to the body of the email, this means a filter within Google Gmail can be created to seek out this repetitive content and automatically take an action. From which you could apply different actions to emails captured within these filters from spamming, trashing or labelling to help you locate certain contents.

How to setup a Gmail filter?

1) Setting up a filter itself couldn’t be easier, although it’s fairly unknown to most users.

2) Head to the default browser version of Gmail and log in to your account.

3) Locate the search bar at the top of the page and select the drop down indicator from the right hand side of the text input box.

Setup Gmail filters

4) Populate the available fields with the requirements for your filter and what content you want to capture.

5) Once complete select the “Create filter with this search” option from the bottom right.

6) Finally you’ll have the option of what should happen to the emails that get flagged up with this filter.

Setup Gmail filter options

How do you use Gmail filters?

Do you use Gmail filters and if so do you have any particular creative tasks you carry out?