Definition
💡 Email filtering is an automated process that sorts and categorizes incoming messages based on predefined rules, called email filters. You can think of email filtering as having a personal assistant who diligently organizes your mail. This feature is supported by most email services, including Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and Apple Mail.
How does an email filter work?
An email filter scans and evaluates every incoming message against a set of conditions specified by the user. These conditions can include the sender's address, the email's subject, or specific keywords in the content, just to give you some examples.
If the email meets the specified conditions, the filter will then perform a corresponding action, like marking the email as important, moving it to a specific folder, or even deleting it. On the other hand, if the outcome is negative (i.e., the email does not meet the conditions), the filter will not execute any action, and the email will be processed as per the default settings of the mail client.
Example
Let's consider a scenario where a user is receiving a high volume of emails from various online shopping platforms. While the user doesn't find these promotional emails very useful on a daily basis, he doesn't want to unsubscribe from them completely because they occasionally contain discounts or special offers that he's interested in.
To manage these messages without having them clutter his primary inbox, he creates an email filter. The filter's conditions are set to recognize emails from the domains of these shopping platforms (e.g., @shoppingplatform.com). The corresponding action for this filter is to automatically move any email that meets these conditions to a dedicated folder named "Promotional Emails".Types of email filters
Email filters can be broadly categorized into two types:
- Server-side filters are set up on the email server by the server's administrator, and they're used more to block unwanted messages than to organize them.
- Client-side filters, on the other hand, are set up on the user's email client, such as Gmail, Outlook, or Mailbird.
How to put a filter on email
Setting up a mail filter varies slightly depending on the email service you're using. In Gmail, for example, you can create a filter by following these steps:
- Go to your Gmail inbox and click on the search bar at the top.
- Click the Show search options button to open the search options.
- Enter the criteria for your filter.
- Click on Create filter at the bottom of the search options window.
- Choose the action you want the filter to perform.
- Click Create filter again to finalize and activate your filter.
