Have you ever wondered if you could sort incoming or old e-mails in your Gmail account? Did you know it is possible? If not then read on this guide, which explains you how to configure your Gmail account to sort incoming and existing e-mails.

Labels feature of Gmail can be used to make this more effective. If you haven’t created any labels yet, you can do so by ticking on the box in front of an e-mail and selecting ‘More Actions‘ drop down box. There you have the option to create a ‘New label.’ You can label your business e-mails, product reviews, newsletters etc. Now let’s look at how to filter incoming and existing e-mails to have these labels applied automatically and other sorting facilities in Gmail.

First go to Settings -> Filters -> Create a new filter. Once you are there you can see few text boxes to enter details such as ‘From‘, ‘To‘, ‘Subject‘ etc. For example, if you want to filter and label incoming e-mails from ‘example-business.com’, add that domain (not the whole e-mail address) to ‘From‘ text box. To see if this works, you can click on the ‘Test Search‘ button, which will return already received e-mails from that domain, provided you have not deleted them permanently. If it is successful, click the ‘Next Step‘ button to proceed.

In this step, you can chose what you want to do to e-mails received from that particular domain. To apply a label either from existing labels list or by creating a new label, you can simply select the option ‘Apply the label.’ There are many other options, for example you can archive it, which will not show it in the inbox but under ‘All Mail.’ Similarly you can star it, which will add the yellow star in front of the e-mail. There are options to forward that e-mail to a different e-mail address or delete it as well.

Using filters together with coloured labels can really help to spot different types of e-mails in Gmail inbox at a glance.

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Tags: Email, Gmail