Unclutter Your GMail Inbox ~ My Digital Life

In today's world, everybody is having an ever increasing online presence. That means having to sign up across multiple websites, many of which you would access only once or twice. This translates to an increased clutter in your inbox as many of the websites keep on sending you newsletters which you may have inadvertently left checked on the signup page. If you are like me who gets loads of such unwanted mails then it could really be a cumbersome experience to manually delete them all or mark as read. Fortunately, GMail comes to the rescue. If you have a Gmail account, then you have already done well and if not, then shake that ass tootsie and get one right away. It doesn't cost you any bucks, you know! And a GMail account would let you get more out of multitude of omnipresent Google offerings. Now, that we are ready with a either brand new or a well used GMail account, we can begin to create some Gmail magic. Did you know that you can have unlimited Gmail aliases? That's what is going to help scavenge our inboxes and keep them in a pristine condition. You do not even need to register an alias. You can create an alias on the fly like yourusername+anyalias@gmail.com. For example, if your username is johndoe@gmail.com then you may create an alias like johndoe+signup@gmail.com. Remember the "+" sign in between. Any email addressed to any alias you create would be delivered to your inbox. Big deal, huh? What you need to do is to use a particular alias when signing up for any new account where you do not want to receive unwanted mails. Go to the "Filters" in settings of GMail and create a new filter. In the "To" box, type the email alias you intend to use on such websites. In our example, we would type johndoe+signup@gmail.com. Click next, and choose any option you may like. You may use the option to "Skip the inbox" and any email addressed to such an alias would automatically be archived without ever featuring in your inbox. But you may sometimes need to access those mails like when you need to confirm a registration. In that case, you may choose to automatically label the email which transfers the email to a folder with the label name you chose and hence still keeping the mail out of your inbox yet keeping it accessible any time. Like in our example, we may choose "Signups" as our label and all emails to our alias would be shifted automatically to the folder "Signups". Whenever you feel the need to access such mail, you just have to go to that particular folder. Of course, you may use other options in filters to suit your requirement. The mails can be automatically deleted, forwarded to a particular address, marked as read, starred, marked as important etc. Welcome to an automatically vacuum cleaned GMail inbox! Of course, all things in life are not as easy and you have to put in some manual labour to vacuum clean your house to escape the wrath of your lovely wife unless you have a "Roomba" to act like GMail and automatically take care of this chore too! Happy Vacuum Cleaning!