Do you ever feel like your e-mail is getting overwhelming with all of those irrelevant spam e-mails that come from companies you knowingly or unknowingly signed up for?
Do you ever feel like you’re overlooking the e-mails that ARE important to your daily life, like those for work and school? Getting confused on which e-mails are actually useful for your life and the ones that are just causing noise?
Do you have Google Mail?
1. Automated Emails Marked as Read
Scenario: You constantly check your inbox after seeing that number of unread messages tick upward, only to be disappointed by mundane content, like automated emails about your UPS package status. This is a good time to set up a “Mark as Read” filter for stuff you want to hold on to, but don’t necessarily need to read.
Set a whole domain name in your filters to follow this rule, or just one specific address, likeship-confirm@amazon.com, the Amazon shipment confirmation address.
2. Auto Archiving
When you archive emails in Gmail, they are removed from your inbox, but are still stored in your Gmail account if you need search for them later. This is a good solution for those who never want to delete emails, but still want to feel like they have control over the amount of content in their inboxes.
Simply create a filter to automatically archive emails from a certain sender or email send to a specific email address, for stuff you want to keep but don’t need to see.
3. No Folders
It’s important to note one shortcoming of Gmail’s filters: lack of folder support. While you can have folders that remove stuff from your general Inbox, Gmail does not do this automatically. This is something those who use a traditional desktop email client like Outlook will certainly miss. The best option is to use labels, in those situations.
4. Multiple Senders
Filters can also work for multiple senders, if you have a list of certain people you want to designate with one label. Simply set up the filter as “email1@gmail.com ORemail2@gmail.com,” and continue from there.
Look no further. I’ve been doing this spam filtering method for a year or two, but Mashable came out with an article recently detailing on how to get rid of those annoying spam e-mails. Read the article here.
Featured photo credit: spam.jpg/Yoel via mrg.bz
