Gmail tip #2: The Filter Label Combo

In my last tip, I talked about using filters to automatically mark as read any emails you send to yourself.

It's taken me a while, because this is a whopper of a tip. I call this tool the Filter Label Combo. It's sort of a two-pronged attack for getting on top of your email. You may already use labels (and yes, Josh the Pen Pal, hopefully with colors, too!). You could use labels for a myriad of reasons, and I'd love to hear what those are for you.

Let me set the stage by giving examples for three approaches of the Filter Label Combo tool:

1. Cataloguing your life (i.e., things you send to yourself such as reminders, etc.): Filtering By Subject. For me, for example, I often send myself recipes, articles or titles of books I want to read, job postings, friends' mailing addresses, funny/interesting things about which I would like to blog, wines I like. I learned to make labels for those things, and I've set filters to automatically (in addition to mark as read) label them. So when I have a few minutes and want to read an article, I know where to go. Or when I need a quick dinner idea, I know where to go. But mostly, just because, I really, really, really like to catalog things. (Steph is like this, too. When she got excited about Systematic Theology, I told her, "You would like that. You like everything that has the word 'systematic' in it. I bet that if I gave you a bag labelled 'systematic garbage' you would love it.")

2. Filing incoming mail from sources other than yourself: Filtering by Sender. For example, I created a filter that added the label Trinity for anything that came in from an address that looked like this: "*@tiu.edu". The wildcard (*) serves as a placeholder for any series of characters.

3. Getting email that's somewhat from yourself; or from mailing lists: Filtering by Recipient. If you forward your email from your school account, this could be helpful, too. And same approach, but different means, for mailing lists.

I really think the whys are more important than the hows, in this case especially, because I think you're all smart enough to figure it out, but I'd like to break it down for those of you for whom it would be helpful. Here, then, are the hows.

Let's start with scenario 1: by Subject. What this presumes is that you'll pick a system so that you can filter. I now send all recipes to myself with the word "recipe" in the subject line, and I'll also put the name in it. So it'll be something like "recipe: chana masala." Here's a snapshot of my emails labelled "recipe." (Incidentally, you may notice that I figured out this method only recently. Also of note: you can still manually apply your label, even though you're now using a filter.)

So, first decide what will be the keyword (e.g., will you put a signifying word in your subject line?) and then proceed to create your filter. Go to Create Filters, and fill in the criteria, like such:

In the next step, you'll probably want it to be Mark as Read, and you'll want to Apply the label... You can create a new label at this point if needed.


Then click and you're done! Test it by sending a congratulatory email to yourself. Woohoo!

Now, to scenario 2: by Sender. Here's what the set-up might like look for the example I gave above. Vary it for your situation.

Lastly, scenario 3: by Recipient. 3a. You can also filter for emails that are sent to your school (or other) account and forwarded to Gmail. (You can ask me for help if you need.) You'd simply set the To in the filter to youraddress@yourschool.com. So any email that looks like it's been sent to your other address gets labeled "calmail" or whatever else you want.

3b. I set a roommate filter/label for emails sent to our house mailing list, males@lists (Maria, Anna, Lisa, Elizabeth, Sarah spells MALES). Similar idea: set the "To:" to the mailing list address and go from there, as such:

3c. Some of you may have heard about this tip from the Gmail blog that discusses how you can add a plus (+) to your account and have all emails still arrive in your box. So you can give away your address as youremail+cb@gmail.com when you sign-up for Crate and Barrel, and if you start getting junk mail, you can just auto-filter to delete. Or you can use it for certain organizations you join. Use the same principle in this Scenario to filter those emails.

Alright. Enough for now. Let me know how it goes! And with luck, there will be a third tip about Quick Links. Happy Gmailing!

P.S. Firefox spellcheck doesn't like my double-l spelling of "labelled" - and dictionary.com says its British spelling. What say you?

Gmail tip #1: Filters

Today's post will be one in a series on a few of my favorite Gmail tools: filters, labels, and Quick Links. Hopefully it will assist those of you who want to use Gmail more effectively. Today I'll start with filters.

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.)

Why I love Gmail labels

As much as I am worried that Google is turning into Big Brother, I love Gmail labels.

The obvious reason is that it's so often the case that one email falls into more than one category. (A testimonial from Google's 2007 April Fools' Hoax, Gmail Paper, brings this to life.) This email is both from Mom, and is a recipe. If I file it in two places, it's twice as easy to find it.

On a deeper level, I appreciate the concept of labels/tags/keywords over folders (to use computer terminology), because it is very much consistent with who I am: the queen of escaping categorization. ("But you pray like a Calvinist!" my friends will argue.) My ideology is very much a both/and sort of thinking (HT: Milton Wu). I am both theologically conservative and liberal; I am serious, yet fun-loving and goofy; I prefer being both scheduled and spontaneous; I majored in both the sciences and the humanities. (Does "I love cooking / I love eating" count, too?)

In fact, one of my favorite parts of chemistry was quantum mechanics and the wave-particle duality. (Which is also, incidentally, what makes Jesus' statement, "I am the light of the world" even more cool, to me: his duality, though, is found in his complete divinity and complete manhood. Are my connections too crazy? Am I a nut? Both Yes and No, right?) I love Niels Bohr's suggestion that anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not fully understood it. So too it is with many theological "truths" - God's sovereignty and man's responsibility? Okay, I won't get into that right now (though I might enjoy a conversation with any of you about it), but it's true: it's mind-blowing and all, and that's precisely why I love it. "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress!" (also Bohr).

I also love the story of the blind men and the elephant; different angles can give us different ideas/perspectives of a unified whole.

And an excellent and helpful analogy from a book I'm reading called Psychology: Through the Eyes of Faith (Myers and Jeeves). In their chapter entitled "Are we determined or free?" they offer this as their closing (emphasis, mine):

So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God's utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens the door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully the wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive state is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can be climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pull. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more honest than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores half the evidence.