Although I have several email accounts, the two main ones are from Gmail: one combines all my personal emails and the other is my professional Xataka account. They both receive hundreds of emails a day, so it’s pretty easy for important emails to get lost among hordes of spam and commercial emails…and that’s not counting ads, because I’ve already removed ads from my inbox. Despite the flood of emails, I think that in general I organize myself moderately well to dodge spam and detect what’s important: these are the tricks I use with Gmail.
blunt with spam mail
You have to be very careful with what we consider spam and I will show you with an example: it is true that streaming services from which I have unsubscribed, my bank or Uber send me the odd email with their services, but from time to time they arrive products that may interest me or promotions, so even if I feel tempted, I never mark them as spam.
But if it comes an email that I am clear that I am not interested in now or in the futureafter opening it and reading it over, I tap on the icon of the three vertical dots and select ‘Report as spam‘. From then on, all incoming email from that address will go straight to the spam folder, freeing up precious space (and my time) in the inbox.
Returning to those senders who from time to time send advertising but from whom you are interested in continuing to receive informative emails, the best option is to go to their website or application and there, in your account settings, deactivate the sending of commercial emails.
Subscriptions under control
As a result of the previous point, each service or application usually has two options: one for that sending of commercial emails and other general informative newsletter type subscription.
The problem is that sometimes you find that you subscribe to too many things: do I need to know the essentials every week from Zalando? probably not and the only thing that interests me is the communications when I buy in the German online store.
You can cancel subscriptions from the service’s web or app, but to avoid the procedure (much longer and, depending on the interface, sometimes convoluted) I go directly to the bottom of the email where companies are obliged to offer the option to delete yourself from the subscription or by touching the icon of the three points in the upper right corner, go to ‘Unsubscribe‘.
How useful it is to silence emails
Every time I sign up for a padel game at Playtomic, I get a notice to my email with the information about it and the payment that, although it may be interesting in order to claim irregularities in the charges, in general they are routine and I don’t read them.
A good way to clear your inbox of certain messages is to use the ‘Mute‘, which you will find inside the icon of the three vertical dots in the upper left corner when you enter an email.
What is the difference between archiving and muting a message? While the first one appears when someone answers, if you silence it you can only resort to it by searching.
pro level searches
The most useful thing to avoid losing important messages is to go to the search bar at the top and make use of its filters: ‘from, ‘to’, ‘attachment’, ‘date’ (with custom intervals, ‘unread’, ‘tags’…
These sieves are enough for most, but I usually speed things up and go a step further by directly writing commands like ‘before:’ followed by a year to read messages prior to that date, ‘from:’ and for example put a sender (you can be a person, a platform, a store), ‘subject:’ to filter emails by subject (ideal when you know that certain platforms use certain formulas for their commercial emails.
Desktop bonus: you and how many more (filters)
Although I access the mail both from my computer and from my phones several times a day so that it doesn’t get out of hand and accumulate the amount of pending emails, but the holidays arrive and here I can forget a lot about my emails. But then comes the return to the routine and with it hundreds of messages queuing up on my accounts.
There are senders who are not satisfied with
From here, a menu will appear to configure the filter, being able to choose parameters such as size, sender, subject… among others. Even if you don’t add anything, you’ll see that Gmail filters directly by the sender (the default option). And on the phone? Actually applying the search with the sender filter you get that partial filter, although on the desktop the filter can be more exhaustive.
In Xataka Android | How to filter Gmail emails and configure your notifications on Android
