Creating a filter in Gmail

Gmail has built in filtering features allowing you to trigger actions automatically when messages arrive in your mailbox. This can be used to forward emails to others, to mark them important, move them to folders to keep your mail organized, or even to delete spam or other annoying messages from groups that refuse to unsubscribe you.

In Gmail with the email message open you can click the three dots on the right of the email to drop down the options menu, select ' Filter messages like this' 

The resulting window should produce a prebuilt search based on what the system would be the most relevant thing to scan on. In many cases this will be the senders address but as you can see you can add or change the search criteria as needed to narrow the search down (the filter will execute on whatever matches these settings in the future).

You will see in the background the results of the search its using.  Modify these settings to your personal needs and click ' Create Filter'

The next screen provides the options for the automations; select the appropriate function from the checkboxes, you can select multiple functions if you wish.  In my example I will select Delete so the mailbox automatically deletes anything matching this criteria going forward.

Another popular setting is to sort your inbound email into labels / folders... that is done using the Apply the label option and selecting the label you wish to sort it to. This is an easy way to gather all the emails from a major customer into one quick to search location.  You can also set the messages to never flag as spam or mark important...

The last option allows you to apply the filter to all of the current matching messages as well as the future ones. 

Clicking create filter will build the job and run it the first time if you chose that option to apply to current conversations. 

Editing a filter  / Reviewing filters in use

Click the settings gear in the top right of your mailbox and click 'See all settings'

Choose Filters and Blocked Addresses from the top menu options displayed

You will be able to review all active filters in your mailbox from this location, you can edit the filter or delete it if it is no longer useful. 

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