According to research done by the University of Loughborough in the UK, 83% of government workers reported feeling more stressed while using email. The survey also discovered that their stress levels spiked during the day’s busiest hours for their inboxes. Intriguingly, the study also found that emails that were unrelated, interrupted work, or required an immediate response were highly demanding. In contrast, emails that came in response to work that had finished were calming.
Since not using email is not an option, your only other choice is to improve how you manage your email account. Although organizing and decluttering your email is a terrific concept, it still takes a lot of time. Setting up labels and filters to better organize your Gmail inbox is a quicker alternative if you use that service.
In this blog post, we’ll concentrate on using Gmail filters to automatically sort your emails.
Need help setting up Gmail filters? Onsite Helper can help you! Don’t hesitate to contact us and an Onsite Helper specialist will be happy to help you.
What are Gmail filters?
In Gmail, filters are automation rules that let you reroute emails as they arrive in your inbox, saving you the hassle of having to manually sort and manage emails.
For instance, you can direct emails from specific sources to the trash or reroute specific newsletters from specific senders into a different inbox. You can even add priority indicators and labels of various types and colours using filters in Gmail. You may make more room, feel less stressed, and concentrate on the discussions that actually matter by eliminating emails in this manner.
How to create a filter in Gmail?
In Gmail, filters can be created in two different methods.
Create a Gmail filter using the search bar
- Enter a keyword or a specific email address you want to filter in the Gmail search bar, then click the settings to the right of the search bar.
- A dropdown menu appears when the settings is clicked. You can further hone your filter conditions using this option. Once you’ve finished, select “create filter” from the menu.
- You can now choose what you want this filter to do.
- Clicking on the “Create filter” button will now create the said filter
- Remember to select “Also apply filter to matching conversations” in the checkbox. All of your previous emails that fit the filter criteria will then be included in the filter criteria.
Create a Gmail filter from the settings menu
- On your Gmail screen, click the “gear icon” in the upper right corner.
- Click “Settings” from the dropdown menu
- The section that appears when you click “filters and blocked addresses” lists the Gmail filters currently in effect for your Google account.
- Click on the “Create a new filter” option to create a new filter.
- If you’ve read the previous part, the dropdown menu that appears when you click this will look familiar.
As in the previous section, the remaining procedures to create the filter are the same.
What can Gmail filters do?
- Skip the inbox – Archive an email to prevent it from showing up there.
- Mark as read – Have an incoming email that has already been marked as “read”.
- Star it – Mark the email as starred in Gmail
- Apply a label – Add a specific Gmail label to an email
- Forward it to – Send an email automatically to a different email address.
- Delete it – Place an email in the trash.
- Never send it to Spam – Tell Gmail to never send a particular batch of emails to spam
- Always mark it as important – Set a group of emails to be automatically marked as important.
- Never mark it as important – tells Gmail not to ever designate filtered emails as important.
- Categorize as – Instruct Gmail to automatically include a certain set of incoming messages under a category if you utilize numerous categories of inboxes, such as Primary, Social, Updates, etc.
Need help setting up?
We understand that your time is valuable. We’d love for you to be able to focus on what’s important and leave everything IT to us – Onsite Helper. We can help you! Don’t hesitate to contact us and an Onsite Helper specialist will be happy to help you.