How to organize gmail by using filters and labels

Emails are playing a major role in our daily life. Irrespective of our work or personal life we use email everyday.

There are many popular free email services we come across. Out of all of that Gmail is occupying a significant portion of user base.

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Look at this room, completely messy and unorganized. It will definitely affect our productivity and it will make us mentally tired, isn’t it?

If your Gmail inbox is messy and unorganized then, it will definitely affect your productivity and cause time wastes.

For an example, think of when you open your Gmail inbox and there are thousands of unread emails left. To avoid such situations we must organize it properly. And this is a one time process, once you arrange it by using appropriate filters and labels, you don’t have to do anything in future.

To organize your email appropriately we gonna use TWO main features comes in Gmail.

• Label
• Filter

Label is similar to folders, it’s used to organize or store emails under various names. Like we do using folders. You can also add a “Sub-Label” into a main label. For example, a Label for newsletters receiving from Quora. You can name it “Quora Newsletters” .

To automatically store newsletters receiving from Quora or any other mailer in the respective Labels you need a important tool, Filters. Let’s look about it.

Using Label you can create various folders to store your emails. But, to do it automatically, you need to set up a filter. Let’s take the above example, if you need to store newsletters getting from Quora in “Quora Newsletters” label, you should create a filter by selecting particular mailer, in this case “@quora.com”.

But the functions that the filters can do, does not stop there. You can create various Filters to organize your inbox in various ways.

Now you have an understanding about labels and filters, but how can we do it. Well, that’s what we gonna see next.

How can we create a label -

Creating a label is a simple thing. Let’s see how can we create Labels in each platforms.

iPhone / iPad -

Make sure you’ve downloaded the Gmail app.

1. On your iPhone or iPad, open the Gmail app .
2. Tap the Menu Menu.
3. Under “Labels,” tap Create new.
4. Type a name.
5. Tap Done.

Android -

On a computer, open Gmail. You can’t create labels from the Gmail app.

1. On the left, click More.
2. Click Create new label.
3. Name your label.
4. Click Create.

Computer -

1. On your computer, go to Gmail.
2. On the left, scroll down, then click More.
3. Click Create new label.
4. Name your label.
5. Click Create.

To Modify, Delete, and edit labels, Please refer this comprehensive article by Google.

So we created labels. Now what, the interesting part comes now!

Creating filters -

We can create filters to store emails coming from a particular site, or emails includes specific words or excludes specific words.

For example, I want to store automatically generated receipts I receive from my educational institution after I paid my fees. To do so. I am creating a label named “CA Receipts” and then I create a filter to store emails from my institution and including the word “receipt” and save it. That’s it, Gmail will automatically place emails receiving from my institution into “CA Receipts” label, if that email includes “receipt” word.

Lets create a filters in each platforms. Same as above, creating filters in android device is not possible. Therefore you need a computer.

iPhone / iPad -

If you want to automatically add labels to specific messages, such as from a certain sender, follow these steps.

1. Make sure you’ve downloaded the Gmail app.
2. On your iPhone or iPad, open the Gmail app .
3. In the top left, tap Menu Menu.
4. Scroll to the bottom, then tap Settings.
5. Tap your account.
6. Tap Label settings, then tap a label name. If you don’t see a label you want to use, create a new label first.
7. Tap Add.
8. In the “From” field, type a name or email address. To add more search criteria, like a subject or keyword, tap And.
9. In the top right corner, tap Save.

Note: Only new messages that match these criteria will be automatically added to the label.

Computer -

1. Open Gmail.
2. In the search box at the top, click the Down arrow
3. Enter your search criteria. If you want to check that your search worked correctly, see what emails show up by clicking Search.
4. At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter.
5. Choose what you’d like the filter to do.
6. Click Create filter.

In the following Example , I have created a label named “PayPal Transfers”. Then I created a filter to store emails I receive from PayPal when I send payments.

Creating a Filter, which automatically stores emails under label “PayPal Transfers”

I’ve specified the appropriate label to the filter to store emails, and I have specified, not to send those emails to Spam.

That’s it, I hope you must have gathered an understanding about filters and labels, and uses of them.

As I said before you can use them in various ways. Like

• Automatically forwarding emails receiving from someone to another recipient.
• Automatically delete emails, if those emails include or exclude specific words.
• Automatically archiving emails if they met with our criteria’s. And so on.

The Ultimate goal of this post is to organize our emails properly and save our precious time.