Gmail is everyone’s webmail client of choice these days and rightfully so because under the hood it hides a lot of powerful features. Today I’d like to show you a method to automatically organize incoming mail in folders.

To start you need to know about the ‘+’-trick. Each Gmail-user has access to an infinite number of email addresses simply by adding a + and a identifier of your choice. For example, if you’re john.doe@gmail.com, you will also receive mail addressed to john.doe+myfilter@gmail.com.

You can make use of this by using this new email-address when registering with a website or when setting up mail forwarding from another email address.

Now if you wanted to filter all messages directed to that address, you’d use Gmail’s filtering feature with john.doe+myfilter@gmail.com in the To-field. Unfortunately some emails you receive on the myfilter-address won’t be matched by this filter because they are group mailings or were forwarded automatically.

Luckily Google knows advanced users like advanced search-possibilities so we can create a filter using a very specific mail-header Delivered-To, which will match everything we want like this:

1. Create a new filter by going to Settings > Filters > Create a new filter
2. In the field “Has the words:” enter deliveredto:john.doe+myfilter@gmail.com which you of course replace with your own filter-email.
3. Click “Next Step” and choose your filtering options: assign all matched mails a certain label and let them skip your inbox immediately if you prefer.
4. Click “Create Filter” and enjoy your filtered inbox.