Know all about how to create filters in Gmail

From this blog, you will get to Know all about how to create filters in Gmail. Every day, all of us receive lots of emails, but not all of them are relevant or important to us. Therefore, depending on their significance, we take the necessary actions. For instance, work emails from the office or colleagues are essential in your professional life. Also, the emails from your family members and friends hold a different meaning. Adding to this list are the newsletter and promotional emails that you receive when you subscribe or purchase certain products or services.

Now, among all these emails, it is only easy to get lost and struggle to find the right and vital ones. Thus, you need to categorize each type of email with the email filters, and if you’re using Gmail, you can do it with Gmail Filters.

How to create a Gmail filter?

1. Open your Gmail.
2. Find and click Show search options from the search box at the top of Gmail.

3. Enter your search criteria. Thus, you need to click Create Filter from the search window. You will find this option at the bottom of the search window.

4. Choose the type of filter.

5. Finally, create your filter through the Create filter option.

Notes: 

• If you create a filter upon forwarding messages, the filter will be applied to the new messages.
• If someone sends a reply to your filtered messages, the filter will only apply to this reply if it fulfills similar search criteria.

Create a filter for a particular type of message

1. After opening Gmail, check the checkbox for the email you want to create a filter.
2. Click More > Filter messages like these.

3. Then, enter the filter criteria and click Create filter.

Steps to edit or delete Gmail Filters

1. Go to the Settings of Gmail. Then click See all settings.
2. After that, click the Filters and Blocked Addresses option.
3. If you prefer to edit your filter, then find out the filter.
4. To remove that filter, click Edit or Delete. If you’re editing the filter, click Continue to complete the editing process.

5. Finally, click OK or Update filter.

How to import a filter?

1. From Gmail, Go to Filters and Blocked Addresses.
2. Click Import filters from the bottom of that page.
3. Choose your file with a filter you would prefer to import.
4. After that, click Open file.
5. Finally, Create filters.

Steps for exporting filters

1. You will find the export option at the bottom of the same page. So, click Export.
2. You will get an .xml file. If you want to edit this file, you can do it using a text editor.

Advanced Gmail Filters options

You can use the advanced filters for your workplace or school. Here, we have listed some advanced filter options for you. 

• Use the From filter to apply a label on an email from someone outside your organization. E.g. From: @your_organization.com
• Again, you can use the same filter From: @your_organization.com to apply the label on the email from someone within your organization.
• Use Has the words: invite.ics for applying labels on meeting invitations on Gmail and skip getting these invitations to your inbox.
• You can apply labels for the important emails you never want to miss, such as emails from your manager or someone from your organization. In this case, you can use the To and From filters. E.g. To: your_email@your_organization.com and From: your_manager’s_email@your_organization.com.
• You can apply a label on the email marked as urgent using the To filter. E.g. To: your_email+urgent@ your_organization.com.
• If you want to apply a label for the emails through which someone shares a Drive file, then you can use the From filter. E.g. From: [email protected].

If you want relief from annoying promotional or other types of repetitive emails, you can set up a label to skip these emails to get them within your inbox. For these cases, you should use Has the words filter. E.g. Has the words: category:promotion, category:social, etc.

Common issues and problems for setting up filters in Gmail

Sometimes you will get errors when you’re trying to filter your emails. These are the possible solutions for your email filtration.

• You can’t find an email if it has been deleted, archived, or marked as spam.

Solution: 

1. Open Gmail and click the Down arrow in the search box.
2. Click All Mail > Mail & Spam & Trash.

3. Enter some words from the missing email. If you can’t remember the words, then leave the fields empty.

4. Finally, click Search from the bottom of the box.

• You can’t find your emails for filtering if it has been already filtered. 

Solution: You should follow the steps to edit or delete Gmail filters.

• When you read your Gmail emails through another email client such as - Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, you may find some issues.

Solutions: 

• If you use IMAP to read emails from other email clients, then check your IMAP settings.
• If you use POP for this purpose, then visit the Forwarding and POP/IMAP settings page. Then follow the instructions from here.

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So, this platform helps to revamp your business workflows, reduces costs, and boosts productivity. You can learn automation with the use cases of Foresight. You will find some robust use cases like – Send recurring emails From Gmail With Foresight, etc.

Conclusion

Creating filters in Gmail helps you to find your emails without too much effort. Thus, it saves you time. Now you’ve understood the process of creating Gmail Filters. Also, you are aware of Foresight. You can easily automate your emails and perform other tasks with this tool. So, try a 14-day free trial of Foresight and get the best result from it. You may learn other topics related to this one, such as - Create labels to organize Gmail, etc.