4 Geeky Ways to Organize Your Gmail Inbox for School

Here are 4 ways to help you clean up your gmail box and keep you better organized in school:

1. Automatically organize all email from your school with a .edu filter.
The first step to keep your email organized is to filter all communication from your school. You can do this easily by setting up a school domain filter. First, go to the filter tab in your settings and click on “create a new filter.”

Next, add your school website domain used by your professors and school administrators in the “From” field. This will filter all email coming from an email address with this domain in it.

Then click on “create filter with this search.”

Now you have a variety of options on how to handle email from your school. You can “star it” automatically, make sure it will “never send to spam,” always mark it as important, categorize it, forward it, etc.

I suggest adding a label for your school email that way everything is going into one folder for you. Check “apply the label” and then select “new label…”

Once you select “new label,” simply create a name for this gmail folder with your school as the folder name and click the “create” button.

When you’re done applying the label and checking any other email filtering options, check mark the “Also apply filter to matching conversations” box so that previous school email will automatically get added into this folder. Also make sure to check “never send it to spam” so all email with your school domain will never get accidentally sent to spam folder.

And then, once you get the email addresses for each of your professors, you can create filters for each of their email addresses and automatically add them with a new label (nested under your school folder).

The process to auto-filter email into a nested label is the same process as above except, when creating a new label folder, check “Nest label under” and select your school folder. Then click on “Create.”

Once you’ve created your nested label, your school email label will have a drop down so you can view email by each of your professors separately.

2. Add Google Calendar Widget to your sidebar.

A great way to keep an eye on your calendar while in your gmail account is to add it into your sidebar. This is very helpful when responding back to profs or fellow students on good times to meet-up. Having your calendar visible lets you see what days/times are booked.

To view your calendar in gmail, simply go into the “labs” section of your Gmail settings and “enable” the Google Calendar gadget.

3. Add a plus sign to your email address to automatically filter certain email you don’t want to fill-up your inbox.

Did you know that adding a plus sign and keyword can help you automatically filter incoming email? Yep, and this is really useful when you’re wanting to filter out certain kinds of emails (e.g. email coming from a website you recently bought a book from, or retail website that you just purchased clothes from).

Setting this up is similar to the process above – except you’ll be creating a filter based on the “to” email address. You will add your gmail account in the “to” line – and add the plus sign and filter keyword.

For example:

• YourEmailName+Bookstore@gmail.com
• YourEmailName+Clothing@gmail.com
• YourEmailName+Magazine@gmail.com

You can add any word after a plus sign in your gmail account to help you filter incoming email automatically.

In the example below, I’m showing you that can set-up a filtered email address for online shopping.

This is how it would look for me:

• studenthack+shop@gmail.com

Then create a filter for that email address so that it skips your inbox and automatically and goes into a specific label folder. I created an “unsubscribe” folder so that all junk email goes into there. I can easily sort all incoming email like this into that folder. This has cleaned-up my email box a lot.

Another tip to drastically cut down clutter in your email is to create a filter for the word “unsubscribe” in any email and send to a specific folder. This means all retail email or mass emails with a “unsubscribe” word in it will get automatically sent to that folder, too.

4. Show “Send & Archive” button in reply.

Another way to clean up your inbox is to go into the “General” tab of your Gmail settings and select “Show ‘Send & Archive’ button in reply.” This way you can automatically archive emails and not need to see them again unless you do a search for them.

Once enabled, you can simply click on the “Send + Folder” icon instead of the “Send” button to make that email disappear after you send it off. Don’t worry, you can find it again by doing a search for it.

How are you organizing your email box? How do you handle all the email you get? Let me know in the comments.

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