How to use filters to streamline VOHeroes email notifications

One way to keep all of our correspondence nice and tidy is to set up a filter in your email account, to automatically route mail from VOHeroes into a folder.

The following is an example for Gmail, which most of our clients use, but you can also do this with almost any other email service.

Simply up a Filter in Gmail that checks the FROM: address and applies a Label to messages received from that address. That label is also going to be the name of the folder that all the mail will go into.

It’s simple to do:

• Pick a piece of mail in your Gmail inbox that came from us, sent from one of our email addresses.
• Open the message, then click on the More button in the icon menu bar above the email message content. It looks like three dots stacked on top of one another:
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• Choose Filter messages like these from that drop-down More menu.
• In the From box of the form, type in the email address of our email account (if it isn’t there already). This will tell the filter to only act on email sent from that account. Also, remove anything in any of the other text boxes on that form.
• Click on the Create filter with this search link in the lower right hand corner of the form. This will take you to the second and final screen of the process.
• Check Skip the Inbox (Archive it) if you just want the mail from your old account to end up in its folder, or leave that unchecked if you also want messages to appear in your inbox.
• Check Apply the label: and choose New label… for our messages, and call it VOHeroes. This will be the name of the folder that your messages from this account end up in.
• Check Never send it to Spam.
• Check Also apply filter to matching conversations.
• Click on Create filter. The mail messages from us will all be waiting for you in that folder, from now on. And when you do have new mail from us, the unread messages will cause the folder label to be displayed in bold letters (in the list of folders on the left hand side of your Gmail dashboard), signaling that…you’ve got mail.

Simply gorgeous. And if you don’t have a Gmail account yet, well, we need to get more bagels and coffee together.