Gmail is one of the best webmail offerings out there and it has a wealth of features to help make your life easier. Two of the most powerful are the ability to automatically filter and label emails as they arrive in your inbox. If you receive a lot of email from the same person, service or software, it can often be tricky to find the information you need. Filters and labels can help you get organised without you needing to lift a finger.
Why Use Filters and Labels
Filters and labels only need to be set up once and they will automatically organise your mail from that point onwards. There are multiple benefits to this.
- Automatically sort your mail into manageable categories
- Use coloured tags to visually identify important emails
- Emails can have multiple filters and labels applied
- Save time manually sorting and let Gmail do the heavy lifting
How to Set up Filters and Labels
Let's look at how to set them up. First we'll want to create our label. Then we'll move onto creating a filter to apply the label to emails.
Let's assume we run a company called ABC Widgets and that any enquiries sent through the contact form on our website are sent from the email address "enquiries@abcwidgets.co.uk". We get lots of enquiries and we don't want to have to manually sort the enquiries from the rest of our mail each time one comes in. Let's set up filter and a label to do it for us.
Create the Label
Log into your Gmail account and in the top right corner, look for the settings icon:
Select Settings from the dropdown list and then go to the Labels tab. Scrolling down the page you should see a button that says "Create new label".
This will open up a new dialogue box where you can enter your label name.
You can optionally nest labels for a deeper folder-style structure. For now, we'll just name our label "Website Enquiries" and click Create. Now we have a label we can apply to any emails.
Create the Filter
Next we want to tell Gmail to automatically sort our email as it comes in. To do this we're going to use the power of Google's search. Let's say we want to filter all mail from ABC Widget company. We know all of their emails come from addresses that end in abcwidgets.co.uk. So, in the search bar at the top of your inbox, click the little downward-facing arrow on the right hand size:
This will present you with a number of options. In the 'From' field we're going to enter the following:
enquiries@abcwidgets.co.uk
Now, if we're confident this will find all of the enquiry emails from ABC Widget company we can go ahead and click 'Filter'. However, it's always wise to see what the filter actually throws up first. So click 'Search' to see the results. This will show you all of the matching email for your filter query. If you're happy with this, you can click the downward-facing arrow in the search bar to open up the filtering options again.
From here, click the 'Create filter' button in the bottom right and you'll be presented with a new set of options.
Now check the box for "Apply the label", click on "Choose label" and select the "Website Enquiries" label we created earlier. Click "Create filter" and you're done. Any mail sent from enquiries@abcwidgets.co.uk will now automatically be tagged with the Sales label as it comes in.
Wrapping Up
Using filters and labels is a really smart way to quickly and efficiently organise a messy inbox. There are hundreds of ways to customise them using a combination of the different search options Google provides. Below are just a few more ideas:
- Use an asterisk in your 'from' search field to filter all emails from a certain company: *@certaincompany.com
- Add a star to all emails from a certain person.
- Create separate inboxes for different email addresses you may own.
- Use the date fields to find and delete old email that arrived before a specific date.
- Use the attachments field to find old email with large attachments. Delete them to save inbox space.
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