Do you find that your inbox is constantly clogged with marketing emails. Basically every website and marketer in the world uses email as a major form of advertising, and the more websites you sign up to, the more email you receive. I am all for receiving email marketing emails, heck I am an email marketer myself, but I like to read through the emails at my own leisure and not have them clogging my inbox each and every day.

Here is a cool tip on how to clean up your inbox once and for all. I have only provided instructions for gmail but I know there are similar feature sets in all the major web mail platforms such as Yahoo and Hotmail.

First thing you need to do is create a “filter“, you can do this by clicking the small link to the right of your search bar in Gmail. In other mail platforms it may be called a “rule” or something similar.

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Next, add the text “unsubscribe” into the “Has the words” field. Since it is required by the CAN Spam laws to allow users to unsubscribe from newsletters, 80-90% of newsletters will contain this text. This is the easiest way to capture the majority of newsletters in one hit.

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On the final step, there are 3 options you need to modify. First, select the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” option, then select “Apply the Label” and select Newsletter (or something similar). If you have not yet created a newsletter label, select “Add New” and create it. And finally select the “Also apply filter to X number of conversations below”.

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And you’re done. Now you should have a folder on the left with the majority of your newsletter emails. Just click it to view those whenever you feel like it.

The great thing about this rule, is that it will capture the majority of new newsletters too. But remember, if you sign up for a website of some sort and are waiting for a “confirmation” or “activation” email to come through, it might be in your newsletter folder. Same with lost password email etc.. Basically any email that comes from a website of any sort.