This Is the Easiest Way to Filter Junk Out of Your Gmail Inbox

No matter how dedicated you are to responding to and archiving all your emails, there will always be one thing preventing you from hitting true inbox zero: all of those mailing lists you're subscribed to. These horrors will visit you at all hours of the day, making it harder to spot the truly important messages in your inbox—and it gets worse once you've gotten fed up enough to disable push notifications and they start to really pile up.

It’s time to banish these buggers. And, if you're using Gmail, there’s an easy way to do it.

Use filters to manage mailing list emails in Gmail

You can use a third-party add-on to go through your mailing lists and unsubscribe, saying goodbye to newsletters and e-blasts. But you know what’s easier and less expensive? Setting a filter in Gmail.

Open up one of your mailing list emails and click the three dots in the menu bar. You’ll see “Mark as unread,” “Mark as important,” and a few other options, but the one you want is “Filter messages like these.”

Credit: Gmail

From there, you’ll see a dialog box asking how you want to filter your messages. You can filter by sender, recipients, and subjects, but also by anything that “has the words…” In the “has the words” row, type “unsubscribe.”

Now, any email containing the word “unsubscribe”—which reputable email blasts almost always do—can be filtered out of your inbox without you having to do anything. Once you type “unsubscribe” there, hit the “create filter” button. The following dialog box will ask how you want these filtered. You can choose to have them archived, marked as read, starred, forwarded, or immediately deleted.

Things to consider when creating Gmail filters

I recommend archiving over deleting in case you ever want to find them again, but if you are sure you’ll never want to open another mailing list, newsletter, or sales blast, feel free to check the box next to “delete.” Note that if you choose to archive but later want to delete them, you’ll have to do so manually. Personally, I am happy to pay for extra Google storage to keep a record of messages instead of inadvertently lose something I need, but I know that's needlessly neurotic.

If you do end up archiving those, the next step needs to be actually unsubscribing from the messages you truly don't want to receive. Gmail has recently made this a lot easier: You can usually click an unsubscribe button up at the top of the offending email. The Google-run email service also rolled out a Manage Subscriptions service this past summer, so once you take a gander at the archive full of junk and notice what you're not exactly needing or opening up, you can head over there and nuke your subscriptions quickly and easily.

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