Filter Gmail automatically?

February 19, 2019 5:07 PM

I receive a lot of press releases regularly and annoyingly. I use Gmail both for freelance work (thus PR campaign bombs) and personal life. Can I auto-redirect all PR to a subfolder that I rarely check?

thank you, emailers!

posted by Jason and Laszlo to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

You can create filters to do that. Click on the three dots on the top right of an email you'd like to filter and then create a filter based on the email address. Skip the inbox and add a tag.

Maybe that's less auto than what you want, since you need to do it for each sender. There are other options you can filter based on, I'd that isn't sufficient.
posted by backwards guitar at 5:25 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Here's Google official help page for Gmail filters.
posted by davcoo at 5:35 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

You can do this and you can even mark them as read. You just have to identify the common element they all have. Do they all have "For immediate release " then you can use that.
The only thing to know is that you have to play around with the filters a little because Gmail always wants to default to setting the label but not putting the message away in the folder. You have to really tell it the right way.
posted by bleep at 5:37 PM on February 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

I have a filter that sends all newsletter/salesy/marketing emails with the word “unsubscribe” to a specific folder. Is there a similar word or phrase common to these PR releases you could do the same with?
posted by cgg at 6:04 PM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

You could try unroll.me -- it's designed for spam and will autodetect that, but you can set it to filter out emails from specific senders, which then get bundled into a "rollup" and sent in a single email once a day (or with different frequency per your settings).
posted by cubby at 6:15 PM on February 19, 2019

unroll.me sells your data to the various marketing companies letting them know about the emails you unsubscribe from etc.
posted by iNfo.Pump at 6:27 PM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yeah, as some other folks have suggested - identify common elements that they have and create filters. The trick, of course, is to make sure your filters don't match email you don't want to miss.

Some terms that I used to filter for that you don't often see in non-PR:

- embargo / embargoed
- briefing
- "schedule a call"
- launches
- "leading provider"
- "today announced"
- "industry leading"

"Today announced" is a dead giveaway. Nobody says that, it only appears in PR boilerplate for reasons passing understanding. But doing a quick pass on my inbox it's 100% positive matches on press releases.

Industry matters, of course. I used to write about tech, if you're covering wombat pet accessories or something, consider filtering on any terms that might be unique to that you won't see in emails from friends.
posted by jzb at 7:00 PM on February 19, 2019

For the mail that sneaks through the filter an example can be dragged to the pr tab and it'll direct all from that source.
posted by sammyo at 7:55 PM on February 19, 2019

Another approach would be to create a new Gmail account for personal use, giving over the existing one completely to PR. That way you can either set up filters to redirect stuff from the PR account to the personal account and another filter in the personal account to file incoming PR-account mails, or just use an email client that understands how to deal with multiple accounts and skip all the filtering nonsense altogether.
posted by flabdablet at 12:27 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

If you don't want to create a second account, you can also just use alternate addresses that gmail considers equivalent (but which can be used to more easily automate sorting using filters.)

As this blog post explains in greater detail, Gmail is happy to:

• ignore period characters in the username portion of the address, and/or
• allow you to append a plus sign and tag after the username portion of the address

So, for example, if your Gmail account is [e-mail], you can sign up for PR mailings as something like: [e-mail].

Gmail will happily deliver mail addressed to that address to your johnsmith account and you can set up a filter rule which filters only those messages addressed to johnsmith+globocorp into, say, a GloboCorp-specific folder..
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:03 AM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]

Or you could switch to a better mail service than Gmail. Fastmail can use alternate addresses to get mail delivered selectively to different folders without you needing to set up your own filter; you just create the folders.
posted by flabdablet at 5:46 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]