I want to move emails I receive from a specific sender to my “Updates” tab in Google Gmail. Is that possible? I already have a mail filter that captures those messages…
If you have a mail filter in Google’s Gmail service, you’ve already done a significant amount of the work, particularly if your filter nails it and catches every message sent but no other messages that are similar. On the bright side, Gmail’s filtering system is really sophisticated and there are a lot of criteria you can combine to make sure that a specific set of messages from one or more domains, one or more senders, with specific subjects or reply-to fields, etc, are identified, and those messages from even those same people or same domains that aren’t on topic aren’t tagged and filtered. Even better, you also have a ton of options in terms of what to do with the messages that match the specified criteria too.
And as for what you ask, you can most assuredly categorize messages that match a specific set of criteria so that they show up in one of the Gmail filter tabs (e.g., Social, Promotions, Updates or Forums). Along with other things too, actually!
Start by going to your Gmail inbox within a Web browser and clicking on the gear icon on the top right:
See the “Settings” option? Click on it to get to the big, busy, and rather confusing Settings area.
Along the top are a whole lotta options. The one you want to click on is “Filters and Blocked Addresses“, as you can see:
Most likely you’ll need to scroll down to find the exact filter you want to modify, but I’m going to tweak my CEDIA filter for simplicity’s sake. To do that, click on the corresponding “Edit” link.
The first part of the mail filter, the matching criteria, appear:
This is an easy filter: Any messages that have the phrase “CEDIA” in the subject or body are matched. Most filters are more sophisticated than this, perhaps aiming for specific senders, are smaller than a specific size, etc.
This set of rules looks good, so you can continue to the action phase by clicking on “Continue” on the lower right.
You can see that I simply drop all my CEDIA-related email into a folder (Gmail calls them labels) called “CEDIA”. Easy enough. You want to do something slightly different, however, what Gmail called “categorizing”.
To see your options, check the box adjacent to “Categorize as“, and click on the menu labeled “Choose category…”:
Pick which category you’d like the messages to match when they arrive, click “Update filter” and you’re done.
That’s it. Easy, actually.
You are magnificent! How wonderful to no longer to have to sift thru the hodge-podge of labels/folders I once had. Weirdly, I had never noticed this before (or didn’t understand what labels were) when I’d check out the settings tab.
Now, I’m still not 100% sure as to the meaning and purpose of labels vs. categories, but have decided this is part of the quaint arcane nature of some Google offerings. Thank you, Dave!