Creating Filters in Gmail

Video Transcript

"So the next thing I'm going to show you in "GMail" is how to create a filter. A filter is.. you can tell Gmail whenever a message arrives with this criteria, to do "this" to it. And to make that make a little bit more sense, I'll show you how that works. Right next to your search boxes, you can see the "create a filter" blank. And it brings up this right here. So you have this different search criteria. You can say if it's "from" a particular person, "to" a particular person or if there are certain words in a subject or if the message has the words or does not have the particular words and if it has an attachment or not. So say I want to create a filter for all messages from "Bob Smith". I would type in from "Bob Smith" and then I would click on "next step" and you can see how basically the filter's going to work down here. These are all the messages I've received from Bob Smith. So whatever I tell the filter to do next, it will automatically be done when these messages arrive; that will do for now on. So the next step is to choose an action. So every time the criteria is that is is from Bob Smith, now I need to choose an action to happen. So, the options are: "Skip the Inbox and arhive it", "Mark it as read", "Star it", "apply a label", "forward it to another email address" or just "delete" it. So, you have these: you can cancel, go back to the search criteria, or just create the filter down here and you can also apply the filter to three conversations. Hello. So I'll just choose "apply a label" and then I'll create the filter. It's set up now. It'll apply the label "friends" to all my Bob Smith emails automatically from now on. Any email from Bob Smith will automatically follow that rule and that label and go straight into my friends label. It's a pretty useful thing. A little bit advanced, but it works well. And I think some of the reasons you might use it - if you set up your labels for like "friends" and "work" and create a filter for everyone from work that sends you an email and then all your friends that send you email. Then automatically Gmail will automatically separate those when you get new emails from those people. And if you want to change any of your filters at any time, you can go into the "Settings" and then there is a "filters" tab and it shows you the filters that you have applied to all incoming mail and you can also create a new filter. So that's how you work with filters in Gmail."