Happy Monster

.ToFilter

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I filter emails pretty liberally, particularly mailing lists and anything automated. If I don’t need to respond to it and seeing it immediately isn’t urgently important to me, it should go into my Read Later label.

Many emails, however, manage to evade my filter axe simply by arriving when I happen to be away from my computer, where my filtermaking powers lie. When I’m on my phone, or if I’m really busy, I might likely just archive the email instead.

As a result, nothing is going to stop that email from hitting my inbox again sometime soon. If it’s an email that comes in overnight, odds are it gets nuked shortly after I wake up while I’m checking my email on my phone– and I’ll do the same thing every week. Waking up to a batch of emails that I instantly remove has become a daily routine.

To combat this, I just invented a nifty little shortcut. I created a filter called .ToFilter.

I lead with the period to put the filter at the top of my list of filters, which comes in handy when trying to label something on my Android phone– which makes me scroll through my massive list of labels to find what I want.

Now, when I get an email that I want to filter, but can’t right now, I simply label it with .ToFilter and archive it. In a matter of days, I caught 30 emails. Each of them is tied to some kind of a newsletter or subscription, some of which I’ll be unsubscribing from. The rest of them are headed to the land of Read Later.

Does anybody out there have a similar little trick to combat such things?

 

  • http://GirlDeveloper.com Sara Chipps

    Adding this right away. 

  • http://twitter.com/bradwilson Brad Wilson

    You use words like “archive” and “label”, so I assume you’re using Gmail. Why isn’t Gmail’s server-side filtering good enough for your needs?

    • http://tonybacigalupo.com Tony Bacigalupo

      It’s plenty good; I use it liberally… what I’m doing here is simply supplementing that system. When I’m on my mobile device, for instance, and I receive an email I want to filter, I can’t create or manage my filters easily from my phone. I can, however, easily flag emails to make Gmail filters for later. 

      When I’m back at my desk, I can look up whatever’s in the .ToFilter label and make Gmail labels for each of them.Do you have a different method for dealing with such things? I am highly curious how different people manage different kinds of email.