Randall F. Dean shows how to use Gmail's advanced search and filters to organize email automatically. Create filters from searches to auto-archive, label, star, or delete messages. Use the Important Mail Only notification setting to reduce distraction.
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Hi everybody. Randall F. Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Hey, if you happen to watch yesterday's video about Gmail and how its folder and filing design is, in my opinion, genius because the labels are folders and the folders are labels, I wanted to give you even more confidence a day to put your stuff away. You don't need to leave everything in your inbox because they've made it easy to find your stuff. So if you didn't watch that video and you're curious about what I'm talking about here, go watch that video. I'll put it in the comments below. But I wanted to also show you that you've got robust search tools. So let's go out and let's jump into my Gmail real quick. Let me move myself a little bit out of the way. It's right up here at the top. Now, if you're just doing basic stuff, right at the top, you know, you can search by name or, uh, you know, topic or information. Put it up there in the search mail, and it's got attachments, last 7 days from me. It'll give you a few of your recent searches. But here's the interesting thing. You pop over here to the side and see this little widget right here. This says show search options. Now I want to show you something sort of cool about this. When you click on this, this is the exact same panel you get when you go into your settings and set up filters. Now, I've already done another video a little bit about how you can use filters to help reduce distraction and identify your most important senders and information. But I wanted to show you this because by utilizing this, you can actually get far more specific. You can put in who it was from, who it was to, what was in the subject line, was there certain words in the email that you know about, doesn't have certain other words, you know, what is the size. So that way, if you know it had a big attachment, you could make it greater than 1 or 2 meg, and that'll greatly limit what comes back. You can specify the search frame. So if you know it was in the last month, you could make it last month. So you're not searching all the way back over a year or more. And you can even set up whether you search all mail or just the inbox or specific folders. Maybe even starred items. So it really gives you some nice capabilities here to do some of this stuff. But now let me show you something that's interesting about this right here. If I come up here and let's do this and I do randy@randalldean.com and I hit Create Filter. Now watch what it does. Did you see the background change? These are all emails that basically came from me to me because I have my business account and I got my Gmail account. And here's the interesting thing. Now that I've done this, notice that it's got this rule when it's from randy@randalldean.com. Look at all the options that you get. Some of these options are pretty cool. You could just automatically archive certain messages. You can mark messages from certain people or senders as read. You can add stars, you can add labels, you can forward it on to somebody else, maybe a second email address of your own if you'd prefer to get it over there. You can set it up for auto-deletion, really helpful if it's a repeating spammer potentially. You can also— this is the one I showed in the video about reducing distraction— always mark it important. The beauty of that is then you can go into your Settings, General Settings, and go down and turn on Important Mail Only under your notifications. So basically you can tell Gmail who your most important senders are, as well as what messages would qualify as most important. And then Gmail's only gonna bug you when is one of those messages, so that way you're not getting distracted constantly by everything. And so, and notice this last one, also apply filter to matching messages. What that means is that not only is it gonna do it from this point forward, it'll probably go in and do everything that just came up with your search using the filters. Now let me explain this. I mean, this is robust, play with it, use it, because that means you can put your stuff away. You don't need to leave everything in the inbox. If you watched yesterday's video, you can either put it in directly into a single folder or you can label it with everything it's related to, then archive it. And either way, it's outta your inbox, so you won't have to look at it again later. And that's really sort of the goal, is to keep from looking at stuff more times than you need to. But now let me show you what I mean here. I'm gonna close this, and I'm gonna go now into Settings. And I'm gonna jump past Quick Settings to All Settings. Because when you do this, I wanted to show you something very interesting. If you come in here and go to Filters and Blocked Addresses, Notice blocked addresses. See, you could block addresses of people that are driving you crazy. And I click on this and then I move myself out of the way a little bit and I can show you that you've got yourself the ability to basically set things up and make things happen by coming here to create a new filter. And if I— oh wait, that looks very familiar. Yeah, take a look at that. It's the exact same panel that I just showed you a minute or two ago. And once again, I can do the same thing, put in randy@randalldean.com, hit create filter, and let's watch the background. And now I've got my choices. You can do it either way. You can either go into your settings and get to your filters, or you could just do a search and create a filter. And either way, you can either find stuff that you're looking for or set up effectively rules that will do certain activities for you automatically. And like I said, the key point here, I mean, you can sort of get the best of both worlds out of this by putting in some sort of rules about what messages would be most important, which senders, what kind of subject lines, what content, as well as which messages maybe should be automatically put into spam or deleted. And that means your most important ones can pop and your least important ones might be getting automatically deleted or removed, which is going to help you with your email insanity. Good. All right, let's finish this thing up. Uh, once again, I am Randall F. Dean, and, uh, let me get this into full screen mode. I'd like to thank you for your time today. I hope this gives you some ideas on how to make this whole thing work better. Um, this is going to be— this video right here, I'm going to include in a new, uh, mini guide ebook. I got it right this time that I'm going to be potentially allowing my YouTube followers to maybe get a copy of it for free. More on that coming soon. If you'd like to get on the list for that as well as learn more about me, go down to the bottom and see where it says send me an email randy@randalldean.com and put YouTube PDF in the subject line. I will start to add you to the distribution list for when this guide is fully put together and ready. Um, and you can always learn more about me out on my channel. If you find these videos useful, please like, please subscribe. All of this helps me with continuing to grow the channel, and I thank you. Good luck with your searches and your filters.
