(subtle electronic music) - [Scott] Do you know how to use filters and labels within Gmail? Even if you're only a novice, I'm going to show you three new ways so you can get the most out of your inbox. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And in today's video, I want to show you how to automatically label certain emails, particularly if it's marketing, or perhaps newsletters
that you subscribe to. I also want to show you how to move emails from specific senders, so that they don't always
show up in your inbox, and you can have a special
location to review those emails. And last but not least, I want to show you how to
build a to-do list queue right here within Gmail,
especially if you find value in emailing yourself tasks or reminders, you can have your own queue to
review those specific emails. So let's start with our first tip, and we are going to automatically move most of our newsletters
and marketing material out of our inbox into a specific label. Specifically, we're
going to have this happen automatically as they arrive. So the first thing that
we're going to need to do is create a new label. To do that, we need to come down to the very bottom here on
the left and select More, keep scrolling down and
select Create new label, and here I'm going to add a
new label called Newsletters. You can call it whatever you want. I'm going to select newsletters because we're going to try and catch as many of these as possible. I'm going to select Create, and if we scroll back up there,
you can see my Newsletters. I'm going to click on these three dots and I'm going to change the color, just so it stands out a bit. I'm going to give it a blue label color. And if I select it, we haven't given anything
this Newsletter label but that's going to
change in a little while. Now that we have the label, what we want to do is come
up here to the search bar, select the Show search options. Now remember, this is our first
step in creating a filter. Yes, we could fill out
some information here and just do a search
on our existing email. But we are going to create a filter that will be applied to
future incoming messages. And it's all going to start
here with has the words, and there's one word that
I can almost guarantee all of your marketing
material has within it and that is the word unsubscribe. Whether you signed up
yourself or unfortunately, if someone sold your email
address to someone else, I can almost guarantee that they're going to
have an unsubscribe link or unsubscribe somewhere
in the body of the email. We're not looking at the subject here, we're looking at has
the words unsubscribe. Now you can review the other
information here as well. But this is really all I'm going to add for this particular filter. Instead of hitting Search, I'm going to select Create filter. Now on the next screen, or the next little window
that we receive here. Now we get to decide what
happens with that email. So what we're going to do here, is number one, we're going
to say skip the inbox, in brackets, archive it. Remember, that's very
different from deleting it, we're just going to archive it, meaning it's going to not arrive, it's not going to start
its life here in our inbox. But there's a second
thing that we want to do, and that is that we want to
apply that Newsletter label. So we're going to come down,
here's all of our labels. We're going to select Newsletters. So now what's going to happen, again, it's pretty straightforward, whenever an email arrives
in my inbox, is sent to me, if it has the words unsubscribe, it is going to get this label Newsletters, and it's not going to show up in my inbox. I'm going to say Create filter. Now you're actually not going to see anything happen live in the moment unless I happen to receive
one of those emails in the next few seconds here. If I click on Newsletters, I'm still not going to see anything here because I didn't tell it to
move all of my unsubscribe or marketing emails yet. But going forward, starting right now, any new messages with unsubscribe are not going to appear here in my Inbox, they're going to appear
here in Newsletters, so I can go and review
them when I want to. And it's not going to clutter up all of my other information
here in my inbox. All right, let's take a
look at a second one here. And this next filter has to do with moving emails from a specific sender. So for example, maybe you want emails that are coming from a
particular domain name, like a particular
organization, for example. Or maybe it's someone
extra important, right? It could be a boss, or
it could be a client, something along those lines. So what we're going to
do to create this filter, again, we're going to come up here and select that down arrow, and we've got a few different
choices that we can use here. This time around, we're
going to use the From field and I'm just going to give
you a couple of examples in this particular case. So one of the things that I often... Of course, I could put in
a direct email address, I can put someone's
specific email addresses, and I could separate them by a comma if I wanted to add a bunch. But let's say that there
was a particular domain that I wanted to be sent somewhere else, I wanted to filter it out somewhere else, what I can do is I can use
my asterisk as a wildcard and say at, and then all you need to do is put in, I'm just going to
use domain.com as my example, all you need to do is put in that domain. So whether it's cnn.com,
whether it's bestbuy.com, I mean, whatever makes sense to you. Again, it could be your own
organization or someone else, you can put this but anyone, again, it doesn't matter
what the beginning of that email address is going to be. It's going to catch every thing here. Now what we can do is we
can continue to fill up other pieces of information if we want to, and then go ahead and create that filter. But there's something else that I wanted to add here as well. What if you wanted to filter everything but a particular domain? What if I wanted to say, you know what, let's go back to that unsubscribe example. Let's say, I want to
continue to filter out, or I want to tweak that
previous filter that we had, I want to tweet out everything
that has unsubscribe. However, I don't want to see if Simpletivity stuff gets through. I'm hoping that you enjoy
my weekly newsletter. And so maybe you want to allow anything that's from at Simpletivity
to come through. Well, all you need to do here is instead of just
putting my email address, which would of course do that
in this particular example, I'm going to put some brackets around it and what I'm going to do
is put in front of it, I'm going to put the minus sign. So what this is saying here is that it is going to move
everything that has subscribe, anything that has subscribe
in the body of the email will filter out as I continue
through with this filter. However, if it has simpletivity.com, if that's the domain name
that it's coming from, because of the way that
I've written this out with the minus sign in front, it is not going to apply
to this particular domain. So make sure that you understand that there are a number
of different operators, we could also use the OR operator if it has the words unsubscribe, or another common one is view in browser, for example, right? In fact, we might want to
use quotation marks for this, quotation mark, so it's
looking for that phrase, because that's a very common
one for newsletters, right? Or, maybe there's another word that you often see in a particular email. So whether it's the minus sign, whether it's an asterisk,
whether it's the OR operator, remember, you can make some
fairly complex filters here, depending on your specific needs. Now, the last one that I
want to show you here today has to do with creating a
to-do list within your email. Now, I don't necessarily recommend this from a productivity coaching, or productivity consulting standpoint, because I don't think your email is really the best place
to keep a to-do list. But yet I understand that we
all work a little differently. And if you find great value in emailing yourself a to-do list or emailing yourself
important emails or reminders, well, this may be helpful to you. What we're going to need to do here is, again, we're going
to create a new label. So let's just quickly create a new label, I'm going to just call this, let's just call this To Do
List, make it nice and simple. We'll come up here, here's our to-do list, should we give it a different color? Yeah, quickly, let's give it
maybe an orange color there. So we've got our to-do list label. Next thing what we need to
do is create a new filter. So if I come up here, let me clear out the information that we had here before
in our previous example. So we've got a blank slate here. So what we want to be able
to do is to move things, or to bring things into that to-do list that is coming from us. So for example, I could
go up here and say, well, I'm going to put
anything from scott@sample.com, anything from this email address, I want it to move over here. Now if I put in a comma, what I could do is I could add other
email addresses as well. Maybe it's my boss, maybe
it's my wife, for example, I could put in other specific
email addresses as well, so that it's more than
just one specific one. But in this example, I'm just going to use this
dummy email scott@sample.com. Next up, I'm going to say Create filter. And then what I'm going to
do is I'm going to say yes, once again, skip the inbox,
I'm going to archive it and apply the To Do List label. So just like we saw with the Newsletters, when anything comes
from this email address, it's going to skip the inbox and go over here to my to-do list. Now, of course, I don't have
to have it skip the inbox, if you think it's that important, and you don't want to miss out on it, well, maybe I would uncheck this and just say Apply this label, so I can quickly and easily
see all of these orange labels, you've got a lot of different
options available to you here. But in some cases to keep
a nice and clean inbox, sometimes it's nice to have
things move directly over here to this label. So I can say create that filter. Now going forward, if I'm
busy, if I'm somewhere away, and I just want to send
myself a quick email, it's going to show up here, and I can review this when I want to. And remember, just like
these other labels, you can see the numbers beside them. So you'll be able to see
the number of unread emails that are waiting for you there as well. I hope you enjoyed today's video and I'd love to hear from you next, which of these three filters and filters and labels combination, did you enjoy the most? Which one are you thinking of applying to your own Gmail system,
or your own Gmail setup. I would love to hear from you along with any other suggestions that you have right here for
the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive
does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
