How to organize your ideas in Gmail - Emailers Anonymous

A friend recently asked me how he could set his Gmail up so that he could email himself ideas, and have them be automatically filed away into a specific label instead of clogging up his inbox. Gmail has a function called Filters which is similar to rules in other email systems, and it is very powerful and well-suited to this task. If you would like to be able to email yourself information and have it automatically be stored away into a label and stay out of your inbox, follow these instructions.

So the first thing to keep in mind is that there are reasons where you might legitimately want to email yourself and have it show up in your inbox, for example you might Reply All to something and find that your email address was included as an addressee. You don't want a thread like that one getting automatically moved into a folder, or you might miss it.

So the solution is to use a custom email address, which is easy. Gmail supports an email standard that allows you to add a plus symbol after your username, and anything you like after that. So an email sent to username+ideas@gmail.com will go right into your Gmail account the same way one sent to username@gmail.com will.

But here's the cool thing: you can filter based on the actual incoming email address. Here's how:


1. Click Settings at the top right of Gmail
2. Click the Filters tab
3. Click Create a new filter at the bottom of the page
4. in the To: field, put username+ideas@gmail.com (or whatever email address addition you want to use)
5. Click Next
6. Check the Skip the Inbox box
7. Check the Apply the label: box, then click Choose label... in the drop down and pick New label
8. Make a label for your ideas, maybe called Ideas
9. Click Create Filter

You're done. Now test it by emailing yourself at this new (fake) email address. It won't show up in your inbox, but should show as unread in the Ideas (or whatever label you chose) folder.

You can use this little hack to set up multiple labels so that you can email yourself specific types of information and set up rules to ensure that they all end up in the right pile.

For more email tips, check out some of our other Emailers Anonymous posts.

Tags: auto-tagging, automatic-filtering, Emailers-Anonymous, freeware, Gmail, gmail-filters, gmail-labels, howtos, labels, tagging, tagging-email