Utilize GMail Labels and Filters

I’ve been using GMail for a long time now and I’m always trying to figure out ways to make my inbox more manageable. One way of doing this is with Labels and Filters. This is the setup that I use to quickly find messages from my most contacted people (friends, family, amazon…).

First, we’ll create a new label.

• Click “Settings” in the GMail window.
• Click on “Labels” in the Settings tab.
• Create a new label for a group of contacts. (i.e. “Friends”, “Work”, “Family”, etc.)
• Click “Create”.

Now we’ve got a new label that we can start adding emails to. Let’s set up a new Filter for this label.

• From the Settings page, select the “Filters” tab.
• Click “Create a new filter” at the bottom of the page.
• From here, there a few different options. You can set up filters for emails from or to a certain person, emails that have the same subject line, or emails that include/exclude certain words. Let’s make one for emails from “Joe Smith”. So we type joe.smith@somedomain.com in the “From” text box.
• Click “Next”.
• Now we can select a label for Joe. Check the “Apply the label: ” box and select the label to apply to this contact.
• I also like to check the “Also apply filter to n conversations below” box.
• Now click “Create Filter”.

And that’s it! I find this really useful and it helps me group all of my emails into easily manageable sections. I recommend creating labels and filters whenever you can!

~ by mheathershaw on June 24, 2009.