Gmail makes it very easy to organize your emails. In this guide, I am going to show you how you can create a new label (conceptually similar to a folder) in Gmail and move specific emails to that folder.
The nice thing about labels in Gmail is that multiple labels can be applied to a single message. For example, you can mark an email from your study group under two labels - "study group" & "research-work". Later, you can open the labels from the sidebar and view messages in that particular label.
For this tutorial, we will create a filter to sort all emails from "[email protected]" and move it to a label called "EmailThis".
Quick side note - EmailThis is a simple "email me this webpage/article service". If you come across an interesting article and don't have time to read it now, you can use EmailThis to send yourself a nicely formatted email with just the text/images from that article (no ads, distractions, and crufty sidebar! yay!). It is completely free, get started here - EmailThis.
Step 1.
Login to your Gmail account and click the small down arrow in the search box at the top. In the "From" field, enter the email address that you want to setup a new label for. For this example, we will use "[email protected]" because we want to move all emails from this email id to a new label called "EmailThis". Now click the "Create filter with this search" link.
Step 2.
In the next screen, choose the "Apply this label" field and then from the drop-down box next to it, select "New label...".
NOTE: You can also choose the "Skip the Inbox" option if you don't want the email in your primary inbox (but only want it inside the newly created label). If you don't choose that, Gmail will 'copy' the email to the new label and it will also retain the original email in your primary inbox.
Step 3.
Now you will be shown a modal window where you can enter the name of your new label. Type "EmailThis" and click the "Create" button.
Step 4.
That's it. You will now be able to see a link in the sidebar called "EmailThis". You can click this link to view all messages that have been marked with this particular label. Any new messages from "[email protected]" will be automatically sent to this label.
If you are using the Gmail app on your Android phone/tablet and have set up a separate label for all emails from EmailThis, please be sure to enable sync for the EmailThis label. Once that is done, all messages from that label will be automatically downloaded and will be available for reading even when you don't have an internet connection. Follow this quick guide here to enable sync for labels on the Android Gmail app.