Email filters seem like a bit of a power-user feature. These are things like “if an email is from this address and contains this text, apply this label and automatically archive it.” It’s pretty cool that we can do that, and I’d wager most clients support some version of that.
I recently saw this:
True life: ~50-100 of my daily emails are calendar invite related (e.g. 1 invite sent to 75 ppl in my org generates 50-75 replies).
— Julia Grace (@jewelia) July 20, 2018
Filtering them has made a HUGE difference (even as an avid keyboard shortcut user). Here is the filter I wrote (w/ skip inbox and apply label):
That sounds like it saves Julia a lot of grief, which is great. It makes me think though… wouldn’t cutting those emails off at the source be better? Hm. Maybe, maybe not. It boils down to if it’s useful to have those emails in the archive or not. Perhaps it’s useful to be able to search for a person and see when you had meetings with them in the past (or future, I suppose). If that’s not ever useful, then I’d see about getting the calendar you use to stop sending those emails. After all, you wouldn’t fight junk email by setting up a million filters, you unsubscribe from them.
So I suppose… only filter if:
- You have no control over the source of the email, and need to exert some control after it arrives.
- You don’t mind getting the email, but you don’t need to see it. It’s useful in search.
- You like doing fancy workflow things, like automatic labeling or prioritization.
If you’re using filtering to trash stuff, try to cut it off at the head instead.