When your inbox contains only a day or two’s worth of unanswered messages, the pace of email seems manageable, and there’s some breathing room in your day. When your inbox is a backlogged chaos of unfinished tasks and unanswerable requests, not only is your email daunting, your whole work life can feel out of control because every spare moment is spent trying to file, catch up on, or respond to the messages that await. Perhaps more important, you spend more time sorting through back emails than you can hope to spend answering the important current ones.

To improve the situation, let’s rethink exactly what we mean by an “inbox.” For most of us, our email inbox is the place where all our messages come first, an undifferentiated cacophony of competing demands for our attention that we have to sort through one by one and hopefully not lose track of. And those messages don’t simply sit there: they accumulate. An urgent message from your boss gets bumped down the screen by a mass e-mail promoting a webinar; an unread message you were cc’d about a project with which you’re peripherally involved jockeys for position with an already read but still unanswered message that is supposed to remind you of a task you absolutely must get done. All these missives pile up in your inbox—what I’m going to refer to as your “primary inbox” from now on—until it’s hard to know where to focus your attention.

The foundation of a successful relationship with email is employing a process that automatically separates different types of incoming messages into different folders, so that your primary inbox contains only those unread messages that matter most. Your other messages are immediately filed in differentiated, topically organized folders so that you can address them at your leisure—or at least within a timeframe that isn’t right now.

This process uses the filters or rules feature that is built into most email tools. Using rules effectively will leave you with a streamlined primary inbox that you have some hope of conquering each day, as well as several other folders that are easy to scan through because each one contains messages of a specific type, about a specific topic, or from one specific person or organization. You will still be in control of which emails you see, in what context, and how quickly, but you’ll be exercising that control through the rules and filters you set up, instead of making time-consuming decisions about each individual message you receive. And you’ll still have access to your undiluted email fire hose, just by using your email tool’s “all mail” feature—though you probably won’t want to spend a lot of time standing in front of the fire hose once you’ve channeled your email into a few manageable streams.

What we’re doing here is getting to work on the idea described in the introduction: Some emails are important for you to see right away, and some can wait for a little while—or a long while. Those that can wait may be hard to identify at first, especially if you’re in the habit of reading every single message to ensure you don’t miss anything. But like the Nepal email and Amazon receipt, not everything is urgent. Think also of notifications that someone has started following you on Twitter, newsletters from an industry interest group or a running club you’ve joined, or monthly financial statements that (admit it) you never open anyway, even if you do want to keep them around for reference.

The team behind Gmail recognized this when they introduced Tabs in the spring of 2013. This optional feature allows the user to create separate tabs to hold promotional emails, “updates” from financial institutions or other organizations, and social media notifications, and automatically files incoming messages in these tabs so that your “primary” tab includes only those messages Gmail thinks you’ll want to see immediately. As the Gmail team puts it, “[t]hese categories make it easy to focus on messages that are important to you and read messages of the same type all at once.” (Note that Gmail lets you tweak and train the way your messages get filed to reflect your particular priorities and categories.)

Creating rules and filters in your email—whether or not you use Gmail—lets you adapt and refine your system so that it reflects your own specific priorities, correspondents, and workflow.

This section will show you how to set up a customized system in two steps:

1. Organize your email with folders, including several that will function as “alternate inboxes”: collections of unread incoming mail that you will review as time allows.
2. Automatically direct your incoming mail into the appropriate folder or inbox (including your primary inbox) using filters and rules.

Organizing Your Email

Before you can set up rules and filters that automatically organize your email for you, you need to set up the folders that will receive and store those messages.

To figure out which folders or labels you need, think about the major categories of incoming email that you don’t need to see the moment—or even the same business day—that they arrive. You will need three types of folders to hold these less-urgent or less-important messages, in addition to your primary inbox. There’s no technical difference between these three folder types; the difference lies in how often you look at them and how you use them.

• Alternate inboxes. These are folders you check daily. You use them to stream incoming messages automatically into different categories based on how quickly and carefully you need to review them. Their purpose is to keep you from getting distracted when you’re processing your primary inbox.
• Reference folders. These are folders you refer to when you are looking for a specific piece of information. You use them to manually file emails you have already read (and addressed, if necessary), as well as to automatically file unread messages that may yet prove relevant. Their purpose is to retain messages you may need to refer to in the future and to organize those messages by topic or context. Unlike your alternate inboxes, you won’t need to look inside these folders on a regular basis—rather, you’ll refer to them if and when you need to locate an older message. You may find yourself peeking into current project folders on a daily or weekly basis; other folders may be relevant only occasionally (like at tax time).
• List folders. These are folders you review when you want to catch up on news or opportunities that may be of interest, the same way you might read news on a website or in an RSS reader. Depending on your available time and on the folder or newsletter in question, you might review the messages in these folders daily, weekly, or never. You will use these folders to collect incoming bulk emails, and to organize them into the categories that are relevant to you. Their purpose is to keep newsletters and notifications in a form that makes it easy for you to find the news you want to read, when you want to read it.

If your email client lets you create nested folders (folders within folders), you can create three top-level folders named “Alternate” inboxes, “Reference,” and “Lists” and create individual subfolders within these.

You may already have a set of folders you use to file emails once you’ve read them, and if you do, consider using these as a starting point for your reference or list folders. (You may even use some of these existing folders as targets for your new filters.)

TIP: If you decide to reorganize the labels or folders you use with a webmail service like Gmail, you may find it easier to do the organizing using a local client application like Mozilla Thunderbird or Apple Mail.app. If you use IMAP (as opposed to POP) service, your local email client will synchronize your folders to and from your webmail service, and it can be easier to reorganize using a drag and drop interface. Just make sure to name, organize, and sync a handful of folders before you invest a ton of time in getting them all set up perfectly, in case you are surprised by any quirks in how your folder structure syncs to or from Gmail (like differences in how each one handles nesting folders or multiword folder names).

Check Daily: Your Alternate Inbox Folders

The first and most important folders to set up are your alternate inbox folders. If you’re used to stashing your messages in folders only when you’re basically done with them, you’ll need to shift your thinking a little. These folders aren’t where email goes to die: They’re where email goes to get dealt with, in the appropriate time and context. Alternate inboxes are folders that receive different kinds of incoming messages, all of which you need to see soon but none of which you need to see as they come in. They’re a way of making sure that fewer emails land in your inbox, without sending a huge chunk of your incoming mail directly to reference folders where you may not ever see it. Alternate inboxes also allow you to process different types of email at different times of the day. For example, you might review calendar requests in the morning and emails for a particular project in the afternoon.

It’s sometimes hard to identify which things you don’t need to see right away, because we all like to keep on top of everything we’re working on. But keep in mind that these inboxes are not junk folders you’ll never look inside again, and the messages they are holding will not fall off your radar: you’re just exerting more control over when you’ll look at them. Again, your alternate inboxes help you keep on top of what really matters by ensuring that your primary inbox contains only the most important or urgent email messages.

But that only works if you really do treat these alternate inbox folders as inboxes, not storage. That means checking them at least once a day and processing or emptying them the same way you would your primary inbox. That’s hard to do for more than a handful of folders, so resist the temptation to create separate mini inboxes for different topics: Instead, create no more than five or ten alternate inboxes, structured around different message types. And since you’re going to be filling up these alternate inboxes automatically using mail rules (we’ll cover those rules shortly), be sure to define each one in a way that can be fed by specific search criteria. For example, an alternate inbox for all internal email is easy to set up (just pull in any email that comes from @yourcompany.com) whereas one for all client-related email will require you to modify your mail rule every time you add a new client to your roster.

The key to making the alternate inbox system work is to schedule at least one chunk of dedicated email time every workday—again, most professionals require at least one hour, either as a single 60-minute block or as two (or more) 30-minute blocks. You may need to check your primary inbox more often, but you should calibrate your alternate inboxes and rules so that you can ignore these folders for up to 24 hours and catch up with them during your scheduled email time.

FROM A USER: I use MailDroid on my Android phone. It is highly customi[z]able, which means I can make it work for me rather than [have to go along with] what the designer says it should look like. I have it in night mode, [I use] a larger font, and I turn off conversational mode so I can deal with new messages as they come in.—Ceri Clark, librarian/blogger

Alternate inboxes also speed up the job of processing your incoming mail. As the Gmail team indicated in their tout for Tabs, separating incoming messages into different categories makes it easier and quicker to scan through subject lines and read or respond to only those messages that require doing so.

Here are the alternate inboxes I have set up for my own email:

• Calendaring. For meeting and invitation requests that contain an actual calendar invitation (.ics file). These show up automatically in my calendar as tentative bookings, so I don’t need to see the actual message that bears the calendar item right away, unless I have a question about the meeting or need to change the time.
• Internal cc’s. For messages I’m cc’d on by people within my company, with the exception of a handful of senior execs (including my direct supervisor), whose cc’s continue to go to my primary inbox.
• External cc’s. For messages I’m cc’d on by people outside the company. I actually don’t use this alternate inbox anymore, but when I was running my own shop, clients frequently cc’d me on their correspondence with other members of my team. These were messages I only needed to check on once a day in order to keep on top of our progress, so they went into my External cc’s inbox.
• Mom. Years ago I developed what I call the “mom filter.” My mom gets her own inbox, which I look at after I’ve come home, rather than on my way into a meeting. If you have correspondents whose messages are important but which you want to look at after the business day, consider giving them each their own inbox or combining them into a separate “after hours” inbox.

FROM A USER: The [number one] rule is to have a separate [i]nbox for mail you are cc’d on and to teach people that if you are cc’d on a [message], that means it’s not actionable. This one rule changes everything. Don’t treat email that you are cc’d on with the same priority as mail sent directly to you.—Scott Hanselman, productivity lover, programmer, and blogger, hanselman.com

TIP: Worried you’ll forget about your alternate inboxes? Keep them highly visible in your email client:

• If your email client supports nested folders, put all your non-inbox folders (like your reference and list folders) inside bigger folders (titled Reference and Lists). That way your inbox folders won’t get lost in a sea of other folders.
• If your email client lets you leave a nested folder in an “unfolded” state (usually denoted by an arrow you can spin down to display all the subfolders in a list), put your inbox folders in a folder called Inboxes and leave the folder unfolded.
• Put numbers in front of the folder name on each inbox. That will push your folder to the top of any alphabetical list, and if you number your inboxes in order of importance, you can work your way through your inboxes from most important to least important.

In addition to the alternate inboxes you feed with mail rules, there are a few other folders I recommend creating and checking regularly. Email won’t flow directly into these folders, as they do with alternate inboxes; instead, you’ll move messages into them manually as you process both your primary and alternate inboxes.

Response needed. I use this folder to stash emails I have read but that require some time or additional information in order for me to reply. You can drag messages into this folder or set up a mail rule that automatically puts any starred or flagged email into your Response needed folder.

Follow-up needed. When you send an email requesting someone’s input, the default is to trust that the ball is in their court, and that you don’t need to do anything until they reply. But that is a recipe for dropping that particular ball, especially when you’re dealing with a colleague with a less-than-stellar track record of email responsiveness. When you send a critical message, put your sent message in a “Follow-up needed” folder, and move it back into the Sent mail folder once you get the reply you require. It’s important to check this folder daily to make sure you’re not forgetting anything; you can then prompt your colleagues for their response as needed. (I’ll explain how to automate this with Followup.cc and Boomerang under “Remember to Follow Up on Your Messages” below.)

Filter needed. This isn’t an alternate inbox, but it’s handy to keep this folder near your alternate inboxes so it’s accessible when you’re processing your mail. This folder gives you a place to move the emails that land in your primary inbox but which you want to filter out in the future. You can go through this folder on a weekly basis and adjust your rules to catch those messages.

TIP:Automatically file your read mail. To expedite the process of emptying your alternate inboxes, consider setting up a collection of folders within your Reference folder that parallel your alternate inboxes, giving each a name that matches its inbox name (such as Calendaring–archive). Set up a mail rule that moves any read message in an alternate inbox into its parallel reference folder as soon as it is more than 48 or 72 hours old.

Check as Needed: Your Reference Folders

There’s a good chance you already have reference folders in place, to hold emails that you have already dealt with or that are no longer immediately relevant but that contain information you may need in the future. You don’t ever have to check these folders; they just hold messages you want to keep on hand in case some day you might need one of them. My most useful reference folders are:

• Tech. For technical instructions from our IT team.
• Accounts and logins. For information on how to access our travel-booking service, intranet, and other services.
• Autoresponders. For automatic replies, such as ones that let me know when someone is out of the office.
• Campaigns. Messages related to our company’s current and past marketing campaigns.
• Client social media. Emails about client inquiries or projects related to social media, so I can keep track of all client interests in one place.
• Testimonials. Emails with kudos on projects or presentations.
• Receipts. Invoices and receipts I need to keep for tax purposes or expense reports.
• Shipping notifications. For notices regarding online purchases I’ve made.
• Projects. I have one big Projects folder, with separate subfolders for each specific project.
• Archive. I drag project folders into the Archive folder once the project wraps.

The specific folder structure you set up depends on which email tool you use, how much storage space it provides, and how you like to organize your archives. If you have unlimited amounts of storage space (or at least, much more room than you need), plus good search functionality within your email program, you may not have a lot of need to delete or organize unwanted or deprecated email, as long as it doesn’t clutter up your inbox. But if you’ve wanted to organize your email into folders and simply dreaded the filing process, keep in mind that most of the filing will be done by mail rules. So set up the folder structure you think would be most helpful to your work, and then create the rules that do the filing for you. (More on that below.)

Check Sporadically: Your List Folders

Oh, email lists! They bring us so much useful information—and so much clutter. Even if you do your utmost to avoid signing up for them and unsubscribe from lists you’ve joined in the past, they have a way of sneaking into your inbox: A social network you join sends you notifications unless you hunt for the setting that turns them off, or a conference you attend sends you weekly updates in perpetuity unless you track down the conference organizer.

Getting removed from those lists (or sending them to your delete folder) will often be your best bet. But there are lists that you genuinely want to be on, so it’s worth setting up folders for the newsletters and notifications you actually want to receive. Set up a separate folder for each newsletter or discussion list you actually want to read (the Quick Start Guide at the end of this book will walk you through the process). You can use the same approach for social networks or web services that provide useful notifications. (For example, I have a folder just for OpenTable reservation confirmations.)

FROM A USER: The one tool everyone should use? Stop what you are doing right now and start using Unroll.me. It will save you time and money. And it’s free. It searches your email for any newsletters that you are signed up for and gives you the one click way to unsubscribe or roll them into one daily email. It cleans out your inbox, still lets you have access to your sales or promotions, and stops unplanned accidental shopping which I always end up doing when a favorite place sends me a promo email in the middle of the day.—Mona Darling, Small Business Owner

If you are a Gmail user and only access your email from Gmail’s web interface, you may not find list folders necessary: Gmail’s Tab interface does a pretty good job of sending social network notifications and email lists to tabs like Social and Updates. But there are some limitations on how Tabs work (see the box “Making Use of Gmail Tabs”) that make list folders and rules very useful, especially if you want to keep different newsletters in different folders so you can read one newsletter at a time.

For each of your list folders, you’ll want to track and adjust how often to review the contents. If you find yourself getting behind on industry news, you may want to book a daily window of time for reviewing your Industry News folder, or at least get in the habit of reading it during your morning coffee break. But you’re just as likely to realize that there are newsletters you don’t miss at all and don’t even care to read when you do set aside time to review them. In those cases you can simply ignore those folders or take the few seconds required to hit “unsubscribe.” The best way to calibrate the frequency with which you wish to review each folder is to check all of them at least once a week for the first several weeks, and then build a routine around the ones you care about most, looking at the others only when and if you feel like it.

TIP: If you are using SaneBox or another email management tool that lets you create custom folders, consider using that service to create each of the alternate inboxes, reference, archive, and list folders you need. Depending on the nuances of your email, you may be able to train your email management service to file incoming email in the correct folders, just as you would by creating mail rules.

To optimize your workflow, you’ll need to do more than determine how often you review each of your alternate inboxes or folders. You’ll also need to create different kinds of mail rules to feed these inboxes and process many of your messages. The next section shows how.

Triage with Rules and Filters

Once you’ve set up your folders, you’ll need to build the rules and filters that will direct much of your incoming mail to those folders rather than to your primary inbox. These rules are the key to automating this process and ensuring that your most immediate and focused attention goes to the high-priority messages in your primary inbox, while other messages land in the appropriate alternate inbox, reference, or list folder.

What Is a Mail Rule?

A mail rule tells your email program how to handle certain kinds of incoming or even existing email messages—for example, ensuring that all those newsletters from your industry group are sent to the proper folder as soon as they arrive.

In Outlook, you can access your mail rules by going to Rules under the Tools menu. In Gmail, go to Settings and then click on the Filters tab. Other email clients have similar setups.

No matter which client you are using, a mail rule is made up of two parts: the criteria that determine whether a particular message will trigger a rule and the action or actions that run once the rule is triggered.

Criteria

Criteria determine which messages your rule will apply to. This can consist of a very simple single criterion, like “all emails from Sarah,” or it can be made up of multiple criteria, such as “all calendar invitations that have been read and aren’t from my boss.”

The criteria you choose must be something that your email service can search for (it helps to keep this in mind as you set up your folders). Useful criteria for rule-building include:

• From. Who sent the message. Many rules systems will let you enter partial addresses in this field, so you can enter @yourcompany.com to apply a rule to everyone who emails you from within your own company or organization.
• Subject. Specific words or phrases in the subject line.
• General. A specific word or phrase that appears anywhere in a message. In Outlook, the closest thing to a message-wide search is the “subject or body” option. If you use Gmail’s “has the words” field, it will search for a term not only in subject and message body but also in the “to” and “from” fields.
• To, cc, and bcc: Who the message is addressed to and who is copied. Use these fields to separate messages that you have been cc’d on from those that have been addressed to you as a primary recipient. The “to” field is also useful for distinguishing between emails that came in to different email addresses (useful if you have multiple email addresses but want to redirect them to a single consolidated inbox).
• When the email was sent. Most email tools allow you to search for a specific date or range of dates, which is great if you want to find an email you got in 2011 or sometime in May but not as helpful if you want to set up a saved search or filter to catch any email older or newer than, say, three days. (Note that some email tools only let you search based on absolute dates, like “March 2013,” and not based on relative dates, like “older than 5 days.” The specific search syntax for dates varies significantly between email systems, so be sure to look up the procedure for yours.)
• Read status. Whether a message has been read or remains unread. This field allows you to file or otherwise act on a message only after you open it (for example, having any read email filed after two days).
• Attachments. Most email search tools allow you to search for messages that have attachments, using a search operator like “has: attachment.” Applying rules to messages that have attachments can be a handy way to avoid the eternal search for that document your colleague sent you (you know it’s here somewhere). You can set attachment-bearing emails to be filed in a certain folder, so you know where to find them. And if you are using the service If This, Then That, you can even set up a recipe that saves all your mail attachments to a cloud-based storage service.
• Exceptions. Many email systems let you create “unless” conditions as part of a rule, so that you can exclude certain messages from triggering a rule that might normally apply to them. This is useful if you have a rule you want to apply to a particular message but perhaps not to emails from your boss, or emails marked urgent. In Outlook, you do this with the “except if” field; in Gmail, you do it with the “doesn’t have” field, or by putting a minus sign in front of your exception in the “has the words” field (for example, “engagement ring”).

Note that this is a partial list: You’ll be able to build much more powerful rules if you know the full range of criteria available in your email tool’s rule builder and understand how to combine them. But don’t feel like you have to become an expert before you start creating rules. Just start with a few simple ones, and explore additional criteria options once you get comfortable with the basics.

To combine criteria, most email tools have an “advanced search” feature. Clicking the tiny arrow in the right-hand end of the search box in Gmail, for example, gives you a drop-down form. I have a strong preference for email services that let me use what is called Boolean search syntax to find messages quickly using just one quick string instead of having to fill out multiple fields with different parameters.

When you are combining criteria, it’s useful to know a few crucial search operators (which join keywords together to come up with a more specific search):

• And. Most search tools assume that when you are entering multiple words in a search (like “cats dogs”), you are searching for a message that contains all the terms—in other words, they read “cats dogs” as “cats AND dogs”.
• Or. If you are combining multiple search criteria, like from:[email protected] and to:[email protected], search tools typically assume that you are looking for messages that are from Sarah and to you. By entering from:[email protected] or to:[email protected], you will instead find messages that meet either criterion.
• Quotation marks. Putting words in quotation marks can help you find an exact phrase. For example, “cats and dogs” will find messages that contain the exact phrase “cats and dogs,” while catsanddogs finds messages that contain both the word “cats” and the word “dogs,” even if they aren’t side by side.

TIP: If you use Gmail, you can enter all your filtering criteria in the “has the words” field using Boolean search, rather than using Gmail’s filter wizard. For example, if you’re renovating your house but you just don’t want to hear about the bathroom, you might want to send most of your contractor’s bathroom-related emails to a specific folder, as long as he is also emailing your spouse and there is no emergency. So you would fill in your search criteria as follows:

Instead of using four different fields, you could simply put the following into the “has the words” field: from:[email protected] to:[email protected] bathroom –(emergency or urgent).

Using appropriate search criteria is the key to ensuring you’re filtering the right messages out of your primary inbox—without snaring the emails that you do want to see there. The best way to know whether you’ve defined your criteria appropriately is by applying your filters to the emails that are already in your inbox, but if your email tool won’t let you filter existing messages, you’ll have to wait a week or two to see how your filters are performing. Either way, once you’ve applied your rules, take a look in the folder or label that should have received your filtered messages. Is there anything that shouldn’t be in there—that should have stayed in your inbox? Is there anything still in your inbox that you had intended to filter? Tweak your filter until it’s as accurate as you can make it.

You can find even more options for making filtering magic by looking up the search operators for your particular mail tool, such as Gmail or Outlook.

Actions

Actions determine what happens to any message that matches your criteria. Your four most common actions are:

• File. When you set a “file” action, it means you want to put a message into a specific folder. If you’re using Gmail, checking the “Skip the inbox” option sends a message directly to that folder (or “label,” as Gmail calls it); leaving “Skip the inbox” unchecked keeps your message in your inbox and applies the additional label to it. This is the most common filtering action. Whenever you build a filter that files messages in a specific folder, be sure to think about how often you will be checking that target folder.
• Delete. If you don’t need to see a message at all or even store it for future reading, you may decide to create a rule that deletes it immediately upon arrival. It can also be helpful to set up deletion rules that kick in after a few days or weeks. For example, you may want to delete any message that contains the word “unsubscribe” if it’s still unread after two weeks. This is essentially the idea behind existing spam filters, but in this case you’re setting up your own highly specific rules about what constitutes spam.
• Forward. You can have specific emails forward to alternate email addresses, to SMS/text messages, or to other web services that have a unique email address associated with your account. For example, you could set up a mail rule that looks for any email that includes the words “white paper” and has an attached PDF, and then forwards it to your Kindle so it’s there for you to read (using your unique Kindle email address). Setting up your cell phone as a forwarding address, so that selected inbound emails can be forwarded to you as text messages, is a great tool for ensuring that the few highest priority emails get to you ASAP.
• Reply. Depending on your email service or client, you may be able to set up automatic replies. (In Gmail, you do this by setting up “canned responses” that are triggered by specific filters.) Think of these as custom autoresponders that don’t have to wait for you to go on vacation. You’ll probably use reply actions very sparingly, but if there are certain kinds of recurring emails you receive (like job applications), you may want to create an autoresponder for any email that matches the pattern.

Which particular criteria and actions you are able to build into your rules depend on which email service or application you are using. In general, systems (like Outlook) that use wizard-based rule builders to create rules via a set of dropdown menus are a little less flexible than systems that let you construct text queries (as Gmail does). Getting to know the nuances of your email client’s rule builder, and getting creative about the way you tweak or combine rules, will almost always allow you to create the rules you need.

Five Essential Mail Rules

Setting up and calibrating your mail rules isn’t a one-time process. As you work out which messages do and don’t need to hit your primary inbox, you will figure out which combination of rules makes your email processing most efficient. But there are a few rules that I recommend for everyone because they have such a dramatic effect on email efficiency. These will make a big impact on your inbox right away and help you get familiar with email rules. (We set up folders for a few of these in the previous section, but now we’re ready to create the rules themselves.)

1. cc’s. If you tend to get copied on a lot of messages you don’t need to see urgently (or at all), create a rule to direct these cc’s to an alternate inbox. Just recognize that the effectiveness of this rule may be limited by the fact that people aren’t always consistent or logical about who goes into the “to” field and who they put into the “cc” field, so you may still be in the “to” field on that email thread long after it’s degenerated into the sales team exchanging animated GIFs. Conversely, there may be some important emails that land in your cc folder, so be sure to look in there before you ask your colleague what’s going on with the Smith account.
   EXAMPLE: Matches: cc:[email protected] – from:[email protected] Do this: skip inbox, apply label “alt inbox: cc’d”
2. Financial records. Ensure all your invoices and receipts land in your Receipts folder so that you have them for taxes and expense reports. Use an exclusion rule to ensure that any bill that still needs payment will hit your inbox.
   EXAMPLE: Matches: (invoice or receipt) or “your bill is ready”–(payable or “past due” or overdue or outstanding or declined) Do this: skip inbox, apply label “reference: receipts”
   You might be tempted to set up a criterion that sends all emails from financial institutions such as your bank or your credit card company to this folder. But you probably still want to receive some of those messages in your inbox. If there’s an email saying there’s a problem with your account, or a late payment notice, you’ll want it front and center. That’s why you should create your criteria based on phrases within the email rather than on the actual sender.
   When you are creating a mail rule, think about how to create the most general rule that would catch the message in question without catching messages you do want to see in your inbox. For example, if you have a “savings tip” email from your bank that you don’t need to see every day, don’t create a rule that routes all emails from @yourbank.com to your Finance folder; create a rule that only targets any message with the subject “savings tip.” This means that you may need to create more rules (than if you just shunted all @yourbank.com emails to your Finance folder), but it also means you’re being smarter about what kind of messages you’ll get right away.
3. Newsletters. This rule or set of rules will place bulk emails into your newsletter folders. You can create a newsletter filter by adding the “from” address or subject line of each newsletter you subscribe to (filing them in separate folders for different topics or sources) or create more general rules that apply to any bulk message. The best way to cut down on the volume of newsletters in your inbox is to shift your news reading away from email and to rely on an RSS reader (like feedly) instead, but if you subscribe to newsletters that don’t offer an RSS-based alternative, or you just prefer using email, having a separate inbox for newsletter messages can be hugely helpful.
   EXAMPLE: Matches: unsubscribe or “if you no longer wish to receive any emails” or “click here to unsubscribe” or “If you don’t want to receive future” or “If you do not wish to receive further email” or “If you do not want to receive emails of this kind” or “If you’d prefer not to receive these messages” or “if you no longer wish to receive communications” Do this: skip inbox, apply label “newsletters”
4. Scheduling. Shunt all scheduling requests, meeting invitations, and meeting acceptances to a separate folder that you can review once or twice a day. (If your email program automatically puts all incoming meeting requests into your calendar on a tentative basis, so much the better.) You can write your rule or rules so that there is an exception for any meeting invitation that gets declined or anything marked urgent.
   EXAMPLE: Matches: ics or “ical event invitation” Do this: skip inbox, apply label “calendaring”
5. The I-can’t-wait-for-this-reply rule. From time to time, you’re likely to find yourself waiting by your inbox for a specific message. Maybe you’ve sent your CEO a four-page memorandum outlining your visionary ideas on the company’s future, or maybe you’ve sent a mash note to a long-held crush. Instead of checking email every five minutes to see if you’ve got a response, set up a mail rule that looks for the email address of your coveted correspondent, and have it send you a text message when that person replies to you. (Look at your mobile provider’s website for how-tos, or view this summary of how to figure out your cell phone’s email address if you’re with one of the leading US mobile providers.)
   EXAMPLE: Matches from: [email protected] Do this: star, forward to [email protected]

TIP: Outlook applies its rules in the order in which they appear in your “rules” window. While this means you need to give some thought to the order of your rules and move them up or down in the list so that they fire in the order you prefer, you can also make this quirk work in your favor. The top three rules in my list of Outlook rules exist only to find messages from our CEO, CMO, and founder and ensure that messages from them are never subject to my other mail rules so they always stay in my inbox. You can use rule order in other ways, too: For example, if you create a rule that moves all meeting responses to a Calendaring folder, but you are worried about missing a decline, create an additional rule that flags any declined meeting request. Place that rule above your calendar-filing rule in the list of rules, and then check the box that says “Do not apply other rules to messages that meet the same conditions.” Now your declined requests will get flagged, and the subsequent rule (filing meeting responses under “calendaring”) will not be applied to them.

Additional Rules and Filters

Once you’ve got your essential rules in place, it’s time to start developing the additional rules or filters that will support your personal workflow. This necessarily involves a lot of experimentation, but here are some rules you may consider adopting or adjusting for your own purposes:

Project and client-specific rules. Consider creating a folder for each major project or account you handle and setting up a rule that files any read email in its appropriate folder after 24 or 48 hours. Create an exception for any message you star or flag, so you have a way of keeping a message in your inbox if you want it to stay on your radar for follow-up.

Noise filter. If your internal systems generate recurring messages, set up emails to filter them out.

Internal filter. If you have significant external-facing responsibilities (for example, sales, account management, or media relations) you may want to prioritize incoming messages from clients, prospects, or the press over internal messages from colleagues, direct reports, or even your boss.

Assistant or colleague filter. If you work with an assistant or colleague who handles certain kinds of requests for you, set up filters that send emails directly to them, so you don’t have to be the traffic cop.

Boss filter. The boss filter is the opposite of the mom filter: It’s there to override any other rules that might file or obscure a message from your boss. Set up a rule that looks for any email from your boss and sends it to your inbox (so that if another rule tries to file it, it comes back to your inbox). My boss rule also flags any email from our CEO as high priority. (If you’re using Outlook, put this rule at the top of your list and check the “do not apply other rules” checkbox.) For extra security, set your CEO’s emails to forward to your phone as text messages so that you can reply as quickly as necessary even if you’re not checking your email all the time. (Just be prepared for an unhappy spouse if you interrupt date night to email the CEO.)

Social media notifications. Social networks love to send you email. Unless you’ve tweaked your settings manually, you may be receiving messages every time someone mentions you on Twitter, connects with you on LinkedIn, or comments on one of your Facebook posts. For most people, the best way to handle these notifications is to turn them off at the source. However, you can also create an alternate inbox for your social media notifications and set up rules to ensure that all social network emails go there instead of to your inbox.

Shipping orders. Create a rule to file all shipment confirmations in a folder labeled Shipments. If you’re wondering what happened to a particular online order or you need your receipts for future returns or taxes, they’ll all be waiting where you can easily find them.

Internal distribution lists. If your company uses a lot of internal distribution lists to circulate news, consider creating a folder and rule for each list you are on. For example, if Bill sends out a “weekly sales figures” email, set up a “sales figures” folder and a rule that files any message from Bill with “weekly sales figures” in the title. You can set up a second rule that deletes any message that fits the criteria when it is four weeks old, so you keep only the latest month’s figures on hand.

TIP: If something that you don’t want to see lands in your Primary tab in Gmail, think twice before dragging it into the tab where it belongs. Gmail will offer you the option of putting all future messages from that sender into the tab you are moving it to, but you may be better off creating a filter that recategorizes all emails with the words “press release,” for example, and not just press releases from that one person.

Implementing and Maintaining Your Own Rules

The easiest way to figure out which rules you need to implement is to review the 100 or 200 most recent messages in your inbox. For each message, ask yourself, Is this a message I want to see in my primary inbox? If the answer is no, ask yourself whether it’s a message that should go to one of your alternate inboxes, a reference or archive folder, or if it should simply get deleted as soon as it arrives.

For each message you don’t want to see in your primary inbox, construct a rule to redirect it to the appropriate folder (or to the trash). If it’s a mass email you don’t want to receive, hit “unsubscribe” right away. If the unsubscribe link doesn’t work, put the message in an Unsubscribe folder so that you can figure out how to unsubscribe later. Continue this process until the number of messages that reach your inbox in one day is no greater than the number you can address in the amount of time you have committed to handling email each day.

TIP: Stop deleting unwanted messages. At least for a couple of weeks, be absolutely religious about considering whether each of your unwanted messages can be dealt with by using a new or revised mail rule. Resort to deleting an individual message only when it’s a truly random message with nothing you can use as the basis for an ongoing rule. If you don’t have time to create the rules you need during your dedicated email processing time window, use your Filter needed folder to stash any message that shouldn’t have landed in your primary inbox, and block off a few hours to catch up on rule creation. (It’s mostly mindless work, so you could even tackle this job while catching up on your favorite trashy TV show.)

You are likely to end up with a very large number of mail rules, but don’t worry; the only disadvantage to having many rules is that it can be hard to keep track of which rule is doing what. So if you need to change something, try to edit existing rules whenever you can, rather than create new ones. Ideally, you’ll have no more than one or two rules for each destination folder. If you’ve already got a rule that sends any message with the word “unsubscribe” to your Newsletters folder, for example, you can simply add another criterion to that rule so that it also applies to any message with the phrase “Click here to manage your email settings.”

Be extra careful if you are using multiple email tools (like using Outlook while at work but using the Mac mail client to see the same email account when you’re at home), since setting up mail rules in multiple programs increases the chances of confusion or even outright conflict. Choose one tool as your primary way to set up rules, and use your second mail tool only if you are trying to create a rule that can’t be accomplished using your primary email tool.

Are Your Rules Working?

Make sure you regularly audit the effect your rules are having on your email, especially in the first couple of weeks after you set them up. If you’re more worried about missing important emails than you are about facing a still-daunting inbox, err on the side of creating rules that let too much into your inbox, and gradually tighten them up to catch the less-important mail that is still slipping through. If you need to get your email under control ASAP, and can live with a few emails landing in a less-frequently-viewed folder, start with rules that err on the side of catching too much, and adjust them if and when you discover that messages have gone astray.

In Gmail, the easiest way to do this is to look in your All mail folder, which will show you everything—including all those messages shunted away by your rules. You can then glance at the labels that have been applied to each message to ensure they are labeled the way you want them to be and that nothing you want to see urgently is skipping your primary inbox. In Outlook and other folder-based systems, take a few minutes to peruse your folders one by one to make sure things look right and that you haven’t missed anything. If your system is filtering out emails that you need to see, you’ll need to adjust those rules so you’re not missing important messages. So be sure you check your All mail folder (or the individual folders) frequently in the first few weeks or after any significant tweak to your rules.

Since email rules change what you see and how quickly you see it, you may want to explain your new workflow to your key colleagues and close family or friends. For example, let your coworkers know that you won’t necessarily see emails they cc you on, so if there’s an item that’s actionable for you, they’ll need to put you in the “to” field. When I was filtering my company’s internal emails so that I could focus more on clients and prospects, I tweaked my rule so that any email with the word “urgent” in the subject line still came into my primary inbox—and I let my staff know that including that word was how to ensure that I would see an email as quickly as possible.

You’ll know you’ve got the right system in place when you don’t find a single email in your inbox that you don’t want to see there. If you’re disciplined about your filtering and unsubscribing, the number of unwanted emails that show up in your primary inbox will diminish very rapidly. As you receive fewer messages in your primary inbox, it will become easier to focus on the ones that do come in.