How to Use Email Filters to Organize Your Emails

Email Filters (or “Rules”) is a simple yet effective way to manage and organize your Inbox. It allows you to perform pre-defined actions automatically as soon as you receive an email. These actions include moving the email to a certain folder, forwarding the email to recipients, deleting, or simply marking the email as read. Additional features depend on your email account provider.


So let’s say I want to put all my notification emails to a separate folder so they won’t mix up. And I only need to go to one folder each time I check new emails or notification from a particular web sites. I am going to use my free email account from Yahoo! The steps should be similar whether you’re using Gmail, AIM Mail, Hotmail, or other free email account providers.

Step 1: Go to www.mail.yahoo.com and log in to email account.

Step 2: Look for “Options” on the upper right hand side and click it. Then choose “Mail Options”… it will take me to the mail option page.

Other email account would show this as “Settings”.

Step 3: Click “Filters” from the side menu and click “Create or edit filters”.

Step 4: Enter a Filter Name… make it an intuitive one so you’ll easily distinguish if you choose to create several filters. So I’m going to name my filter as “eHow Feed”.

There are always two stages in creating Email Filter, (1) identifying the criteria and (2) choosing the action to be taken.

Step 5: Now start setting up the criteria for the email filter. You have the option to add the source email address, subject name, or a specific word in the message body that will help the system identify what you want to filter.

Step 6: Choose the action to be taken. In Yahoo! Mail, I only have the option to move emails to a destination folder. I am going to pick “[New Folder]” since I have not created a folder for it. Click “Save” and you will be prompt to enter the name of the folder. I’ll name it “eHow Feed” and OK. Now my Email Filter is completed.

Other email accounts like Gmail have the option to automatically forward email or delete email when it matched the criteria. Automatically deleting annoying emails is a cool tool… just make sure your Email Filter is very well defined not to delete desired emails.

Using Email Filters allows you to manage and organize your Inbox making it easier to find emails or get rid of emails that you don’t want to see in your Inbox. You can sort by recipients… could be emails from all your former officemates, high school friends, and notification from different sites like eHow or Facebook or Twitter.