ORGANIZING YOUR INBOX — SIMPLE AUTOMATION TIPS FOR GMAIL
E-mail is important. We all rely on it. Decades back, getting an electronic mail would be a surprise. Today, getting a physical mail would be a surprise. How times have changed. E-mails are easy, free and reliable. With over two hundred billion e-mails flying around daily, a problem results. A handful of those will nest in your inbox. Give it time, and a trickle becomes a river. Your inbox now contains thousands of messages. In this article, I will show you how to solve one of the problems that result from the ease of sending e-mails — overflowing and unorganized inboxes.
If you are like most people, staring into your inbox gives you a headache. Why? — Two thousand unsorted e-mails staring back at you. Today, we get an email for everything imaginable. Newsletters come in daily, notifications from social media accounts, advertisements from companies you haven’t even heard of, transaction alerts from your bank. Oh and all the unnecessary CCs and BCCs from work. And I almost forgot — the fifteen weekly e-magazines you subscribed to. But do not despair. We can salvage the situation. Just follow along and apply the tips I am about to give you and your inbox will be way more organized when we are done.
To achieve an organized inbox, we will be working with labels and filters in this article.
Labels.
Let us start with labels. In the paper world, we group related documents together into folders for easy management. In the same way, our inbox should be organized into folders. Permit me to say that labels are like those folders (though they are not. A label is more like a tag added to objects to identify them).
Think of the emails in your inbox, what categories can you group them into? Write them down.
Look back at the categories you wrote, is there any of them that can be broken down into sub-categories? Make sure these sub-categories are atomic. You could have a “school” category that can be broken down further. Each of these categories will become a label. You can even have nested labels. The sub-categories will become nested labels under their corresponding labels. In the paper world, that is analogous to having folders grouped inside cabinets — better organization.
Creating labels in Gmail
Looking into my inbox, I was able to come up with several categories: School, Bank, Newsletters, Social media. Analyzing each category, I saw that some of them can be broken down further. For example. My “Newsletter” category can be broken down into subjects: “Programming”, “DIY”, “Tech”. So, I am going to create a “Newsletters” label and nest other labels “Programming”, “DIY”, “Tech” in it.
- From your Gmail homepage, click “More” from the menu on the left pane.
2. Click “Create new label”
3. In the New Label dialogue, type in the name of the label.
If you want to nest the label in another label, select the parent label from the “Nest label under:” option.
4. Click “Create”
Filters
Now that we have labels, we need to sort our mails and apply appropriate labels to each one. But don’t worry, it will be automated. We will create filters. They will help us sort all our old emails and automatically sort incoming mails and apply the appropriate labels.
How to create filters.
Filters are created in the advance search menu. In the search field, click the arrow “Show search options”. This opens the advanced search.
In the advanced search, we will try to describe the kind of mails that should pass through the filter to be created. Fill the fields as described below. Leave any field that does not apply blank.
from: to allow messages from a particular sender.
to: to allow messages to a particular recipient.
subject: to allow mails that contain a particular subject line.
has the words: to allow mails that contain particular words.
doesn’t have: to exclude emails that contain particular words.
size: to allow messages that are greater than or less than a particular size.
date within: to allow messages within a specific period
search: to limit the search to a particular group of emails.
has attachment: tick this box to search only messages that contain attachments
don’t include chats: tick this box to exclude chats.
When you are done filling the search criteria, click search and check to see if you are satisfied with the result.
If you are satisfied, click “Create filter”.
You are presented with about eleven check-boxes. We will bother with only two of them: “Apply the label” and “Also apply filter to X matching conversations.”
The apply the label option says that new incoming mail should be given the label you have created. Click the arrow to access the available labels and click the applicable label from the list.
When you are done, click Create filter. The label you have created is applied to all emails that fit the search criteria automatically. In the future, as you receive new mails, if they match these search criteria, the label is also applied to them automatically.
If everything worked right, the labels you have created should have appeared on the menu on the left pane. If you click any label, only the mails in that label will be displayed instead of the thousands of emails in your inbox.
We have discussed how to keep your email inbox organized. To keep the system we set-up efficient, you should keep reviewing and making changes as the need arise.
To complete the cleanup of your inbox, you can set your account up to automatically delete emails that match some criteria. For example, mails that are older than one month or mails from a particular sender. In future articles, I will show you how you can do that. Cheers to a cleaner inbox!
