How To Auto-Archive Emails in Gmail?
On a normal day, I receive about 300+ emails in my Gmail account, however it becomes quite a hassle to go through each and every email and segregate the important ones. However with Gmail, there are several ways in which you can segregate noise from actual work and that is one of the reasons I love it.
The Auto-archive feature in Gmail is definitely useful and should be used if you plan to work on having a zero-inbox for emails.
Auto-archiving is pretty simple with Gmail, but the first thing you should do is, determine which emails really require your attention and then follow the simple steps below for auto-archiving other non-important emails, which you can take care of later.
For example you can auto-archive all shopping emails and email forwards, jokes so that you can take a look at them when you have some free time.
Steps for Auto-archiving Gmail Emails
Step 1: Click on the Create a filter link on the top of the page.
Step 2: In the options that appear, enter the appropriate search criteria for filtering emails. For example if you want email from certain email address to be auto-archived enter it in the From box, if you want emails with certain subject to be auto-archived enter it in the subject box and so on. You do not need to fill out every criteria and can create the filter using just a single criteria.
Step 3: Click on the Next Step button and select the checkbox next to Skip the Inbox (Archive it)for the emails matching the criteria you entered to be automatically archived. Additionally I also apply a temporary label to the emails, so that I can deal with those emails and categorize them after I have read it.
Step 4: Click on the create filter button to create your new filter.
Once you have followed the steps above you are on the path to having a zero-inbox. Look forward to more tips for Gmail in the coming days. Let us know if you have any doubts or want to share your thoughts with us.
Want more tips on Gmail, visit the Gmail Tips section to learn more.
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Author: Keith Dsouza
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Awesome! Thank you SO much! This really helped me, and I couldn't find the answer to this question anywhere on Gmail's help page. I too use gmail as a biz account and have ~500 emails per day so this was the biggest issue i had on using gmail.
Hi and thank you for your useful information, however, my gmail still does not Archive automatically. I have to select all then archive manually, or else, it filters, but a copy of it still stays in “Inbox”.
Thanks for your help in advance.
Frank
Not sure your approach is doing what most people would think of as ‘archiving’ (auto or otherwise). That’s more like ‘auto-filtering’ (which could very well be why google calls the feature ‘creating a filter’…) or ‘rules’. Archiving usually means moving messages from point A to point B after some amount of time (e.g. archive items that have been in your inbox for more than 90 days to a ‘Historical’ folder, or label) Thanks for the steps, though!
See here http://www.internettipoftheweek.com/427/how-to-automatically-archive-old-messages-from-your-gmail-inbox/
This provides a means to archive all mail older than a certain date.
The only disadvantage here is that it is an absolute date (yyyy/mm/dd), not a relative age (e.g. older than 3 months). So the filter only works once, after which you have to change the date. But at least it is something.
Thanks for the tutorial. Your approach works well for mail you anticipate (and hence know the address, subject, etc. to filter). But what about mail you do not anticipate, i.e., things that are not regularly recurring? Is there a way to automatically “archive” or filter all mail once it’s been read—w/o clicking the archive button and w/o setting up multiple filters?
@Matt – Right now there is no option to automatically archive emails after you have read it without clicking on the archive button
P. S. The only auto-archiving option I see when creating a filter is “Skip the Inbox (Archive It).” However, I don’t want anything to be archived until after I’ve read it.
Thanks for your help!
Thanks.., This article helped me alot.