Art Of Money

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.

An Email Filter is a Redirection Tool

This is the second installment in my Tech Tuesdays series where I endeavor to present some technical tips that can save you time or help make your life online a little better.

Last week I started out with How to Choose An Email Address so I’d like to continue on the e-mail theme.

Tonight’s topic is: email filters. This topic was kind of inspired by ProBlogger’s group writing project on “Lists.” At one point Darren was saying that the project was a bit overwhelming because he was receiving so many entries.

Darren had asked people to send in their submissions using his contact form which would then get delivered to him via email. I thought to myself, “how could Darren outsource the task of compiling the 301 entries which arrived over the 4 days?”

He could hire someone and then put their email address in the WordPress contact form so they would receive any submissions to the form, but then they would receive any other, possibly important or personal submissions as well…so forget that plan.

The best solution is the email filter!

In Gmail, which is what I use, there is a simple link that says “create a filter” [for the most part all modern email systems have filtering capabilities] that pops open a window with 5 fields on it that you can filter by.

Set the Preliminary Filter options [click to enlarge]

In ProBlogger Darren’s case we would probably create a filter that uses “From:” of his WordPress contact form sending address or the “Subject:” of the WordPress contact form…mine is “[Art of Money] Contact form” so just put that in the subject box and you will catch all the emails sent from your contact form.

Fill in the criteria for how to deal with the filter messages [click to enlarge]

Then you can add into the “Has the words:” box the keyword you want to filter on. For Darren’s project it is likely, because in the submission he asked them to, they would include the word “List Project” in the body of the contact form…so we could filter on that and then we would just get the contact form results for that project.

The last step is to set the option up for what to do with the emails that are caught by the filter.

1.) Skip the inbox. The whole point is to not have to deal with any of these emails.

2.) Apply the label: ProBlogger. This is the equivalent of what would be moving the email to a special or dedicated folder in any other email system.

3.) Forward a copy. To the person who has been hired to do the compilation work. Now they can receive only the filtered emails from the contact form, log into the blog with a limited credentials account and compile the “LISTS” story for Darren.

All he has to do it wake up in the morning, have a look at the post and push the button for it to go live.

That’s the power of an email filter in a nutshell and of course there are lots of other cool and time saving ways to use email filters.

I personally have them set up to search for the word “receipt” and then auto archive receipts for tax purposes.

If you have Internet marketers that abuse your inbox, but you may want to see one in 20 of their messages, just have them filtered into a special folder and then you can have them out of your face but still venture into the folder once and while to see if by some miracle, one of them sent you something worthwhile.

The last thing they are useful for is if you go on vacation, you can filter important emails and send them to a friend who may be able to deal with them in your absence.

That’s it for this weeks Tech Tuesday. If you have any topics that you’d like me to cover, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best.

Jon