Gmail Filters and Labels: Keep Your Email Inbox Clean!

Why You Need To Use Gmail Filters

Bloggers, Website Owners and other Internet users who subscribe to a lot of sources like Daily News sites, Blogs, Newsletters etc. via Email receive as many as 20 subscription updates on a daily basis. When you rely on Email for important information like job related updates and security notifications, missing a single such email might have serious consequences. Thus, it is highly advisable to keep your Gmail inbox clutter to a minimum. While you can’t do anything about spam mail which doesn’t get flagged by Gmail, regular subscription updates can be filtered out of the inbox pretty easily to keep only important stuff.

While this post only deals with creating filters in Gmail, you can always create a Free Gmail account and forward your email from other services like YahooMail, Hotmail/Live and RediffMail there.

Suppose you have subscribed to DragonBlogger.com updates via Email (highly recommended!) and know that you are going to receive the updates from a specific “From” Email address. You can set a Gmail filter, say by the name “DragonBlogger”, to skip all the emails coming from the particular “From” address from the inbox and make them accessible from the sidebar by clicking on the “DragonBlogger” “label” link.

This way, you can easily access the latest updates from a particular subscription with a single click on the “label” and at the same time keep the inbox clean.

How To Create A Gmail Filter?

• Step 1: Go to Mail Settings page from the Gmail Inbox.
• Step 2: Click on the Filters tab link.
• Step 3: Go to the bottom of the page and click on “Create a new filter”.
• Step 4: Enter the details and proceed to the next step.
• Step 5: Check “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)”.
• Step 6: Check “Apply Label” and select New Label from the drop-down menu (or select an existing label!)
• Step 7: Create the new label and create the filter!

Now you may create as many labels as you wish for each email subscription source or a single label called “Subscriptions”. You may also create more labels under the “Subscriptions” category by using “Nest under” in the final step of creating filters.

Please share your experience below.

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Samir Saurav Majhi

I’m a Generalist Researcher working on a Theory of Reality, Horticulturist, Blogger, Natural Systems Analyst and Amateur Architect