Ever send emails to yourself? I do. Whether it's a todo item or a link to an article I want to read later, it's nice to just send it off to myself, knowing that I'll have it with me no matter where I go. One of the things that used to bother me was having to mark it as read when it came in, because I like to keep my Inbox at zero. But apparently not everyone does that. (How do you not do it? Slash, I still owe a friend an email about how I do.)
But it didn't have to bother me for long. Even though I'd been using filters for a while, I just recently realized I could set a filter to mark as read any incoming mail from myself, so that it would be automatically done for me, and I would never get unnecessarily excited and then quickly disappointed at "new" mail. Here's how you do it.
1. Once you've logged on, click on the Create a filter link to the right of the search bar buttons at the top of the main page. (Alternatively, go to Settings | Filters | Create a new filter.)
2. Type in your email address in the From: field and then hit the Next Step button. (You can test the search if you want, but that's usually more useful for more complicated filters.)
3. Check the box Mark as read, and any other boxes you like. (I'll talk more about some of these options in the next tip.) You can also check the box Also apply to [#] conversations below, if you've tested the search and you do, indeed, want to use the filter retroactively.
This concludes the first in the series. I hope this helps reduce the unnecessary disappointment of false hope from getting "new" mail that isn't really new. Really, you don't know how excited I get when I see this: Inbox (1). (And thus equally disappointed when I realize it's just my own reminder to myself to work on my budget later tonight.) And yet I know that there are some of you out there who don't manage their Inbox to zero. How do you do it, I ask again? Do you constantly keep track of what the baseline is? What's your system for the unread emails? Someone, please enlighten me.
For the rest of you, I hope you sleep better tonight because of this.
And, everyone, feel free to share your best tips on filters!
(Tune in later this week for using filters with labels.)
1 comment:
Haha, nerdy! But oh so useful. When I got home, I went through all of my emails and put labels on them (using the filters feature too). And I organized my other email that had about 1000+ junk mail from colleges and now its down to zero!
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