Although I have several email accounts, two are from Gmail: one combines all my personal emails and the other is my professional Xataka account. Both receive hundreds of emails a day, so it’s pretty easy for important emails to get lost in the spam and commercial email piles… and that’s not counting ads because I’ve already removed the ads from my inbox. Despite the e-mail flood, I find myself moderately well organized overall. avoid spam and find out what matters: these are the tricks I use in Gmail.

blunt with spam mail

You have to be very careful about what we consider spam, and I’ll show you with an example: it’s true that streaming services I’ve unsubscribed from, my bank or Uber send me a weird email with their services, but from time to time they come products or promotions that might interest me, so even if I feel tempted, I never mark them as spam.

But if it comes an email that clearly states that I am not interested now or in the futureafter opening and reading it, I tap on the icon of the three vertical dots and ‘report as spam‘. From then on, any email from that address will go straight to the spam folder, freeing up valuable inbox space (and my time).

Returning to senders who send advertisements from time to time but are interested in continuing to receive informative emails from them, the best option is to go to their website or app and there, in your account settings, disable the sending of commercial emails.

Subscriptions under control

As a result of the previous point, every service or application usually has two options: one to send commercial emails and other general informational newsletter type subscription.

The problem is that sometimes you realize that you are subscribing to too many things: Do I need to learn the basics from Zalando every week? probably not and The only thing that interests me is the communication when I buy from the German online store..

You can cancel subscriptions from the service’s website or app, but to avoid the procedure (which is much longer and sometimes complicated depending on the interface) I go straight to the bottom of the email where companies have to offer the option to delete yourself. Subscription or by tapping the three-dot icon in the upper right corner, go to ‘.unsubscribe‘.

How useful is muting emails?

Every time I sign up for a padel game on Playtomic, I get a notification in my email that while it’s interesting to claim irregularities in fees, they’re generally routine and information about payment. don’t read them

A good way to clear your inbox of certain messages’mute‘ you’ll find inside the three vertical dots icon in the top left corner when you enter an email.

What is the difference between archiving and muting a message? While the first one appears when someone replies, if you mute it you can refer to it simply by calling.

professional level searches

The most useful thing to not lose important messages, search bar at the top and take advantage of its filters: ‘from, ‘end’, ‘attachment’, ‘date’ (custom ranges, ‘unread’, ‘tags’…

These sieves are sufficient for most, but I usually speed things up and write commands like ‘before:’ directly and then write a year, ‘from:’ to read messages prior to that date and for example a sender (you can be a person, a platform, a store) , ‘subject:’ for filtering emails by subject (ideal when you know certain platforms use certain formulas for their business emails.

Desktop bonus: you and how many more (filters)

Even though I access the mail several times a day from both my computer and my phone, the holidays are coming and I can forget a lot about my emails here to avoid accumulating the amount of emails waiting out of control. But then comes the return to routine, and with that hundreds of messages waiting in my accounts.

There are senders who don’t just send you an email, sometimes double, triple, or even quadruple their mail. If it’s happening to you or just want to bundle similar messages together run actions in batch (like archiving or deleting at once), the desktop version has a very useful feature:Filter messages like thisAfter tapping the three-dot icon you will see ‘.

From there, a menu will appear to configure the filter so that you can select parameters such as size, sender, subject… among others. Even if you don’t add anything, you’ll find that Gmail filters directly by sender (the default option). And on the phone? Actually when you apply the search with the sender filter, you get that partial filter, but on the desktop the filter can be more granular.

Xataka on Android | Filtering Gmail emails and configuring your notifications on Android