Day 18: Filters and Rules
The automatic approach to inbox organization
Yesterday, we talked about the right way to use labels and folders. Today, we'll extend that concept to make it even more powerful, by automating it. We'll show you how to use filters and rules to automatically move messages and change their properties.
Filters (Gmail and Thunderbird) and Rules (Outlook and Mac Mail) are the names that mail clients assign to this feature. From this point forward, we'll refer to them both as "filters."
Filters operate as soon as a message arrives, and they can do some pretty powerful things. For example, you can create a filter to automatically flag messages from your boss for your attention. Or you can move all messages from a high-volume mailing list into a folder, without having them appear in your Inbox. This way, you can have all of the information from a mailing list available if you need it, but you don't have to spend attention archiving all of those messages every day.
Today's action items will focus on learning how to use this feature effectively. Since each mail client provides significantly different functionality in its implementation of filters (and they change it regularly!), you'll need to spend part of today's RYI time outside of the program site. Happy exploring!
To do: Estimated Time: 15 min
- Familiarize yourself with your email client's filter/rule functionality. Here are links for some common mail clients: Gmail Outlook Apple Mail Thunderbird Yahoo
- As a test, create a filter that takes all email from us (reviveyourinbox@baydin.com) and flags/stars it to get your attention.
- Consider ideas for other filters that are appropriate for the kind of messages you receive. Some examples are below.
- Create at least one custom filter to automate some part of your email workflow.
Filter Ideas:
- Move all messages from a mailing list to a folder (To contains "mailinglist@mycompany.com")
- Flag/Star messages that mention your current major project (Message contains the term "ProjectX")
- Mark social network notifications (From contains "socialnetwork.com") as read, so you can look at them after you've looked at everything else
- Move low-value social network notifications (Subject contains "is now goggling at you on Peeper!") to the Archive automatically
- If a message is from your server monitoring company (From contains "serverisdown.com") forward it to you as a text message
- Reply automatically with the correct contact information if someone emails you with a certain term in the subject
- While you're on vacation, mark all messages where your email address doesn't appear in the To: field as read
- Automatically move any message larger than 5 MB to your local folders
Share today's info:
Final Thoughts
| Filters and Rules are a great way to manage high-volume mailing lists. Learn how. | Tweet |
| Most people have never created a filter, missing a good opportunity to boost productivity | Tweet |
| Don't go overboard with filters! Heavy(20+) users don't report feeling more in control. | Tweet |
Filters are most commonly used to automatically handle "gray email," that is, messages that are of enough value that you don't want to unsubscribe, but not enough to justify dedicated attention. They're useful for a lot of other things too - we hope the list above will inspire you to create a set of filters that are perfectly customized for your mailbox.