Trying to get my inbox (multiple inboxes, actually) organized before school starts. I began by deleting a bunch of junk, and relabeling everything to be more straight forward. I also edited the colors of the labels to be more visually appealing. I think it’s coming out about as nicely as possible. :) I hate having so much baggage from the past decade in my email, but I also hate deleting stuff since I often find myself needing to search for old emails...
I also like to periodically change the theme/background to be relevant to the season or whatever is happening in my life at the time. Helps me feel less stressed somehow.
Are you constantly overwhelmed by the never-ending flood of emails in your inbox, unsure of where to start or how to prioritize? Well, fret not, for this article has you covered. With practical tips and techniques, we will guide you on how to effectively manage and prioritize your tasks within your email inbox, ensuring that you stay organized and focused on what truly matters. Say goodbye to…
ok, sending this into the internet in case anyone has any ideas
I would really like to not use google chrome anymore, for many many obvious reasons
However, I have a particular chrome extension for my gmail which I am incredibly dependent on. Like, I am not able to function or do basic emailing without it.
It’s basically a kanban sorting view of my messages that has no bearing on folders or tags, but I can physically shift messages based on their status.
Of course the extension doesn’t work in firefox and I can’t think of a workaround or other solution and it is something I kind of need.
How To Make Gmail Organize Itself Part 2: It Gets Fancier
This is Part 2 of How To Make Gmail Organize Itself, for freelancers and volunteers and everyday folks who are just tired of seeing Walmart flyers in their "Important" mail tag!
It assumes you have already read Part 1 and/or know how to set up basic filters in Gmail, using email address variations. Now buckle in kids we're about to get fancy— and by fancy I mean bending email to our will.
It Gets Fancier Bending Email To Your Will
Congrats, you've created your first filter for handling newsletters, and now they're all going where you want them to go and aren't cluttering up your inbox any more! Yay!
Now it's time to tackle... flyers.
So, email flyers/sales notifications/digital brand loudspeakers/whatever you want to call them are actually a bit tricky to handle.
First of all, as mentioned in Part 1, you might want to use something+flyers@ as your filter rule, but it's hard to get cashiers to spell, or maybe the POS terminal won't accept the + symbol. So you use some.thing@ as your backup filter rule... but you've already used +flyers for some previous signups. What do? Do you have to create a brand new filter?
Never Fear, Search Operators Are Here
No, good friend, you do not have to keep a separate filter for every email variation you use! Because we have search operators, special command words that tell Gmail to handle instructions in certain ways. You may have already encountered them if you've done advanced Google searches before, but most people don't know that you can also use them in Gmail, and by extension in Gmail's filters.
Let's take our some.thing@ / something+flyers@ example. We want to apply the same results to emails coming in to either of those email addresses. In other words, whether an email comes in to some.thing@ or something+flyers@, we want the same thing to happen.
First off, we can either create a new filter (if you don't already have one), or edit your existing flyers filter (if you do). Let's assume we're making a fresh new one, to save on screencaps.
When using search operators in Gmail filters, you can write them directly in the field that you want them to affect. Some of them are caps-sensitive; in the case of the "or" operator, it needs to be in all-caps (OR) to be recognized as a command.
(Categorizing emails is completely optional, separate from label/folder organization, and is only really useful if you use the "Multiple Inboxes" setup and organize your emails that way. I just wanted to include it as an example.)
There you go, that's your first filter with a search operator! Now you can use either email variation freely for flyer signups, and be confident that they'll all be handled the way you want them to.
...Or will they?
Email is Complicated, Actually
If you use your email to sign up with a store that uses a points system, such as iunno let's say PetSmart, you may have noticed that they use the same email address as your login and primary point of contact for flyers, online orders, and/or digital copies of in-store receipts.
This can be problematic, because you might not care much about checking flyers very often, but it's important to be able to keep track of your receipts. Having to regularly go into your Flyers folder to dig out receipts that were caught by the filter isn't really a net time saver.
Search Operators To the Rescue, Again!
Don't worry, we can fix it! As we already saw when making our first filters, there are other fields we can add rules to, including the subject line. And as you may have noticed in the link above, there are many search operators, not just OR, and they can be used to fine tune which emails filters affect, and how.
Here are some of the most useful search operators for Gmail:
- (minus, hyphen): Means "not", or "exclude".
e.g. -receipt means "does not include the word 'receipt'".
OR (in capital letters): What it sounds like; putting it in all-caps tells Gmail to treat it as a search command. You can group multiple OR commands with brackets, and you can chain ORs in a row.
e.g. night OR evening means "includes either the word 'night' or the word 'evening'".
e.g. free (breakfast OR lunch OR dinner OR meal) means "includes the words 'free breakfast' or 'free lunch' or 'free dinner' or 'free meal'".
e.g. ((twitter OR tweet) (notice OR alert OR notification)) OR (facebook (message OR notification)) means "includes the words 'twitter notice', or 'twitter alert', or 'twitter notification', or 'tweet notice' or 'tweet alert' or 'tweet notification', or 'facebook message', or 'facebook notification'".
* (asterisk, star): Known as a "wildcard", * means "anything can go here". It's most useful for capturing parts of words or addresses that might change often.Can be used to match variations that occur in part of a word or address.
"" (quotes, quotation marks): Quotes are used to indicate that you want only these exact words in that exact order.
e.g. "cat groomer" would match emails containing the phrases "our cat groomer", "mom's cat groomer", or "the local cat groomer". It would not match "the groomer", "grooms cats", or "dog groomer".
You may have already figured out how we can use these to our advantage! We know that emails that involve receipts and order information use certain email addresses, subject lines, and messages that flyer emails do not, and we can use search operators to separate those out.
Putting It To Work
As our first example in refining our filter, receipt emails tend to say "Your receipt" or "Your order receipt" right in the subject line, while flyer emails don't. So in our flyer filter's Subject field, we can add the operator -"receipt" to say "don't include emails that say 'receipt' in the subject line".
The same is true of order confirmation emails, though you have to be a little more careful. Flyers will often use phrases like "Order Now!" in subject lines, so we can't just use the word "order" alone. But order confirmation emails often say "Your order" specifically, so we can use that by adding -"your order" to the filter's Subject field.
Other words that are common to receipts and order confirmations, but not flyers, are "confirmation", "pickup", "shipped", and "refund".
Last of all, most companies have a dedicated orders@ email address that they use for sending out receipts and order confirmations, while they use a separate email address for flyers and promotions. So we can add -orders@* to the filter's From field, to tell it "don't include emails coming from an address that starts with orders@".
(If you want to be really fancy, you could use -(orders OR receipts)@* instead to specify "doesn't come from an email starting with orders@ or receipts@". -orders@* -receipts@* will do the same thing. Go with whichever is easiest for you to read.)
All together, our filter should now look something like this:
If you want to test whether your filter is catching (or not catching) the emails you want it to, you can click the "Search" button instead of "Continue" to get results. Your filter rules will be saved in the search bar up top, and you can click the slider icon to go back to editing it:
When you're happy with the results, click "Continue", set the result actions to what you want them to be, and click "Update filter".
Bam, you're done!
Wait, but it looks like I don't actually have to use the "To" field?
Sharp eyes, my friend, and this ties in to what I said earlier about how you don't have to use email address variations to create filters. If you don't want to sign in to every service you've ever used to update you email address to the variation you need (and I don't blame you), you can use the other filter fields along with search operators to create rules based entirely on the email's content.
The downside to this is that email address variations make it much easier to create fast, easy-to-read filters. Without them, your filters will typically have to include many more search operators to grab only the emails you want, making them longer and harder to read (especially if you make adjustments and edit them over time).
If you don't mind catching all emails of one type in the same bucket, then these kinds of filters work just fine! Here's one that catches all major incoming social network emails using only the From field: *@tumblr.com OR *@facebook.com OR *@twitter.com OR *@linkedin.com OR *@instagram.com OR *@reddit.com
Note that this filter will catch everything coming from those address, including general notifications, account sign-in alerts, private message notifications, updates to terms of service, and anything else they might send.
Operators, Operators Everywhere
Hopefully these examples so far have given you enough of a basis to figure out how to make the filters you need to make your inbox work for you. There are a ton more search operators to make use of, including whether an email has an attachment, if it already has a label, whether a word is located close to another word, and even whether a YouTube video is linked or attached.
There are also search operators based around how old a message is (such as after:DATE, before:DATE, older_than:Xd, and newer_than:Xd), although you can't use them on filters, because filters only act on new emails as they come in.
Lastly, it's important to remember that filters run in the order that you created them in. If you have a filter that would mark one email as important, and then a second filter after it that would mark the same email as not important, the email will end up marked as not important. If an older filter isn't acting the way you expect it to, check your newer filters to make sure they aren't interfering somehow.
Ready To Go
As someone with really poor executive function, I have to admit using email filters has made work, school, and personal communications immensely easier to take care of. I use search operators and email address variations to auto-sort digital receipts, sports club newsletters, bank notices, travel plans, social media alerts, home service quotes, you name it.
As a last little gift from me to you, here are some operator strings you can plug directly into your Gmail search bar to either create a new filter, or to manage your email in general:
Grab all emails in the Flyers folder that are more than a month old (so I can delete them)
in:Flyers older_than:1m
Search everywhere for that one photo mom emailed me around New Year (that I might have accidentally deleted)
Find any digital receipts that I might need for my taxes (and ignore appointment reminders)
newer_than:1y ((("donation" OR charity OR charitable OR medical OR "dental" OR insurance) receipt) OR (payche* OR "deposit" OR paystub OR "bank name here")) -in:Flyers -"e-transfer" -booking -blood -"bottle deposit"
Grab any support requests or troubleshooting emails
to:me (from:support@* OR subject:("support" OR ticket OR request OR case)) -subject:(receipt OR reward OR invitation) -in:Flyers
What the heck do I have due (or overdue)
subject:(due OR overdue OR missed) subject:(alert OR reminder OR notification)
Dig up all older mail that I haven't sorted into a folder yet
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Is your inbox flooded with mails? There might be a lead in one of those. Check out these best inbox management tools or hire a virtual assistant
Stop ignoring those unread emails as they may have a solid lead. Email management gets simple with tools like thunderbird, clean email, etc, or email virtual assistant!
A flooded inbox is always a mess! More than that, you can find a game-changing lead in that mess. Here are 10 best email management tools that you can use to filter your inbox or if that sounds like too much work, hire a virtual assistant!
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