Finally, you managed to register your own email address, something like yourname@gmail.com that is required for college applications or that part-time job at Chick-fil-A. And suddenly you found yourself being the owner of the inbox full of newsletters from all the shops you've ever been, replies from Canva, your group project teammates and some actually important email from your guidance counselor about scholarship deadlines. Not good, isn't it? Fortunately, there is a rather easy way to deal with such a problem – auto-reply rules.
To clarify the issue, let's imagine the possibility of creating filters for emails in the most common email providers. Filters can automatically sort the incoming messages depending on certain criteria, such as sender or keywords in the title. In other words, you're going to teach your inbox to do the job of your personal assistant but this one does not cost you fifteen dollars an hour and does not eat your leftover pizza. The filters will simply sort the emails properly and thus you will receive them when you need it.
First of all, let's start with the most popular free email provider – Gmail. Log into your Gmail account from your computer, not from your smartphone because working with settings via mobile app is as fun as pop-quiz in the morning. You should click on that little gear icon in the upper right corner of the page and then on the option "See all settings". Now you should click on "Filters and Blocked Addresses" – and here comes the magic.
Then you should click on "Create a new filter". There appears a window with several input fields and the field you're interested in is the field called "From". Enter the email addresses of all those who should send you important emails, such as your parents, your boss, your school counselor and that one teacher who answers the emails. You can also enter a whole email domain, such as @school.edu if your school district uses it. In this way, Gmail will recognize the emails from these addresses as important ones.
Now, after entering the field you should click on the button "Create filter" in the bottom right corner of the window. Gmail will now offer you a list of actions it can make automatically when these emails will arrive. And here you should be careful. First of all, tick the box "Star it" to give you a visual marker of these messages. Then tick "Never send it to spam" because filters can become too aggressive sometimes. But the most important action is ticking the option "Also apply filter to matching conversations" so the filters will mark those emails you've already received and thus you can return and find all the important emails you've possibly missed.
If you want to make things even more exciting, you can assign them with a special label, such as URGENT or DO NOT IGNORE in all capital letters, because sometimes you should yell at yourself. Labels in Gmail work similarly to the folders but even better because you can assign several labels to one email without duplicating it. Magic!
Outlook users have similar possibility too. Microsoft allows you to use something called "Rules" that you can create by clicking on an email and then on "Rules" and "Create Rule" options. There appears a step-by-step wizard where you can create rules for emails from your school administration to automatically star them, move to the specified folder and even notify you on the desktop. Outlook has slightly better possibilities in this regard than Gmail.
But now let's consider the step that people usually neglect but it makes a significant difference. Assign a special sound or vibration pattern for the starred or labeled emails on your phone. For Android you can do it using Gmail built-in notification channels feature. But for iPhone users it is somewhat tricky because Apple is quite conservative about the notification settings but apps like Spark or Edison Mail allow you to set VIP senders and give them a special notification sound.
The idea is that relying on your memory to sort out the important emails is the very bad strategy. You have homework, extracurricular activities, maybe even a part-time job and definitely too much time on TikTok. Your brain has much more important things to do than remembering to manually sort out forty unread emails three times a day. Using filters you simply automate the process of sorting out the important stuff while the rest remains hidden as usual.
Last but not least, every few weeks you should review your filters and update them. People change their email addresses, you get new important contacts, old ones fade away. Updating your filters takes just a few minutes and you will avoid quite an awful situation when you discover that you've missed the email about the deadline of two weeks ago. Nobody likes explaining such things to his teachers and especially college admission offices.
Go and create your first filter before you forget it, statistically you will.
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