We get a lot of emails on a daily basis, and sometimes important emails can get lost in the process due to there being too many emails and you could end up missing one or two. This can have negative consequences, like bills that you forget to pay because you missed the invoice, or a family member or a friend seeking an urgent reply, but their emails got lost in the pile.
Thankfully, Gmail has the ability for users to filter their emails, which can be an incredibly powerful tool if you’re looking to take control of your emails and learn how to prioritize them, set their importance, and so on. If you’re unfamiliar with how to filter your Gmail emails, you’ve come to the right place so let’s get you sorted.
How To Create Email Filters In Gmail
In case you’re not sure what filters do, basically it filters emails based on what you tell it to look out for and applies things like labels, automatically archive it, delete it, automatically forward it, and so on. The more precise your parameters are, the easier it will be for Gmail to filter the emails for you, but at the same time, using broader parameters can also make it easier to apply filters en masse.
For example, if there is a particular person you want to filter emails from, then it might be a good idea to type in the person’s full email address. If there’s emails from your electricity company, then maybe typing in the company’s name is good enough since companies might sometimes send you emails using different addresses.
- Go to your Gmail and click the gear icon located to the right hand side of the page
- Click See all settings
- Click on the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab
- Scroll down and click on Create a new filter
- Type in the parameters you want then click Create Filter
- Choose what you want Gmail to do when it detects an email based on your parameters
- If you want to apply it to existing emails, you can check the “Also apply filter” box
- Click Create Filter when you’re done
- Repeat the steps above to create and apply additional filters
How To Filter Unread Emails In Gmail
The steps above will help you filter emails from particular addresses or emails that contain specific keywords or phrases, but what if you want to filter emails that you have not read? Given that sometimes we can skip certain emails as we don’t think it’s particularly important (yet), our email list might contain a mix of read and unread emails.
- Click on the search bar at the top of Gmail
- Type “is:unread” to display all emails that are unread
- If you want to ignore unread promotional or social emails, type “category:primary is:unread”
- Hit enter and you should see all unread emails
- You can click on the additional settings below to see unread emails based on date, if it has an attachment, and so on