TOO MANY GMAIL FILTERS: Reduce them with logic!!
If you have more than 2 GMAIL filters that assign an email message to one specific label than this solution is for you!
Let's say you have a customer with two emails, customer@onemail.com and customer@twoemail.com.
Typically, you have one filter for FROM:customer@onemail.com that may skip the inbox (Archive It), star the email, and Apply a label [IMPORTANT CUSTOMER].
As shown below the first filter could be setup as below:
Now to catch the second email a second filter could be setup as seen below:
FROM:customer@twomail.com that may skip the inbox (Archive It), star the email, and Apply a label [IMPORTANT CUSTOMER].
However, GMAIL has a back door solution, if you will or maybe you won't, either way this solution works.
In order to setup both emails in one filter be archived, starred and labeled as [IMPORTANT CUSTOMER] on can take advantage of boolean logic within the criteria textboxes.
We simply want to say if the email is from customer@onemail.com or customer@twoemail.com then archive it, star it and label it [IMPORTANT CUSTOMER] one can simply express that within the criteria text boxes.
The boolean logic used '|' for OR and '&' as AND to create on filter. The way to do this for our example here is shown below:
customer@onemail.com | customer@twoemail.com
The new filter looks like this:
You can use '|' and the "&" symbol for boolean logic. Due to technical issues with the ampersand '&' its better to surround it with parenthesis in this manner shown below:
customer@onemail.com) & (customer@twoemail.com.
If you look below the "Create Filter Dialog" in the GMAIL Filter Interface you can see the search results outcome. You may want to also include the parenthesis with the OR '|' character like this :
customer@onemail.com) | (customer@twoemail.com
It is consistent and makes sense.