Wouldn’t it be great if things could automagically happen when you receive certain emails in your Gmail account? For example, taking all mail from a particular sender and filing it away into the proper folder, or, having Gmail automatically respond when an email is received a certain person? Well, stay tuned because we’re about to show you exactly how to make that happen with the pure power of Gmail’s built-in filters! If you have ever used an e-mail program such as Apple’s Mail or Outlook, you are probably familiar with “rules,” which are almost exactly the same as Gmail’s filters.
First, you will want to head to http://www.gmail.com, which is your Gmail dashboard. From there, find and click on a particular message that you want to filter in the future--for example, an email message from your boss or significant other. When you click on this message, you will see a small clickable box to the upper right that says “More.” Click on this box and choose “Filter messages like this.” From here, we can now create our filter that will work for us on messages like this in the future.
First, fill in some of the conditions that you want Gmail to match in the future--such as only messages from this one person, or, has the words “work,” or “Florida.” You can even tell Gmail to exclude certain words instead, such as acting on messages that don’t have the word “Purple.” Other conditions that can be matched here include size of the message--a great way to automatically filter out large messages that may contain large attachments. You can also pick out messages by subject, whether it has an attachment or not, and even who the message is directed to. All we are doing here is saying something like: “Gmail, let’s watch for any message that is attached to Carol, and is less than 5MB in size, and contains the subject “Vacation Rental.” Now, let’s actually act on those particular messages!
From here, hit the “Create Filter With This Search” button down below. Here’s where the fun begins! Now, we can choose what we want to do with these filtered messages. In this next window, you can choose a multitude of options--from skipping the inbox, or, starring the message, or, even deleting the message before you ever see it. You can also choose to forward these messages to someone else automatically, or, marking the message as important or not. Take a moment to look at every option in this window and craft these actions to your needs. When you’re happy with the choices, hit “Create Filter.” You can even choose to have Gmail apply this new filter to all of the messages already in your Gmail inbox, which could be hundreds or thousands!
As you can see, the power of Gmail filters is limitless--this will help you take full control of your inbox and get to a perfectly organized email inbox without even lifting a finger!