How to Automatically Move Emails to Specific Folder in Gmail?

Keeping mails tidy in the Gmail account can be tedious even though Gmail offer multiple ways of organizing your emails based on different criteria. At times you would experience certain emails ending up in folders that they shouldn’t be in and making you lose out on important updates. Then, you have tried manually moving them (one after another) from one folder to another, and it seems stressful or tasking. If this situation looks familiar for you, you will be looking for an automated way to achieve this. Then, here is the solution to automatically send emails to specific folder in Gmail. If you are also using Outlook, check out our article on how to receive emails in specific folder in Outlook.

Automatically Move Emails to Specific Folder in Gmail

Before proceeding you have to understand two terms in Gmail – filter and label. Unlike other email services like Outlook, Gmail calls the folder names as labels and rules as filters. The whole process is creating a filter that would indicate the emails (based on sender or subject info) you would love to receive in to a specific folder. It could be a custom folder or one of the already existing Gmail folders. Follow through with this guide to get this done in your account:

Create Email Filters in Gmail

Filters create rules for the organization of your existing or future emails. Login to your Gmail account, and from your home dashboard, move your cursor to the top-right corner and click the “Gear” icon having the title “Settings” when you hover on it.

A “Quick settings” sidebar menu appears, then click the “See all settings” bar button. From the dashboard that appears, click the “Filters and blocked addresses” menu tab at the top. 

Tap the “Create a new filter” text link and a dashboard to fill in your filter details or criteria pop-ups. Here is the description of the following options to consider in the filter;

• From: enter the email sender(s) and separate with a comma if they are more than one.
• To: enter your account email as the receiver here.
• Subject: certain words that you can remember that come with the sender’s mail.
• Includes the words: specify exact keywords that must be in the subject line.
• Doesn’t have: identify words that shouldn’t be in the subject line.
• Size: the mail volume to sort either greater or less than a particular unit in MB.
• Has attachment/Don’t include chats: to mark and check if the mail should come with these items or not.

Once you enter these details, click the “Search” button to test run if such criteria exist in your mail before clicking the “Create filter” button.

Setup Filter Based on Sender or Subject & Move Mails

The most criteria in use are that of the sender or subject line filter option, and that’s our case study. Enter the email address(s) of your favorite sender(s) or their usual subject lines (if you can remember that), as shown in our instance here.

Hit the “Create Filter” button, and a dashboard with many options to accompany your filter comes up. Just check the one with the title “Apply the label:” and click the “Choose Label…” drop-down menu. 

Choose an existing custom Gmail folder or create a new one by clicking the “New label…” options menu. Enter the label or folder’s name, and choose whether you want it to come under another one or be a stand-alone. Tap the “Create” button and proceed further afterwards.

With the specific custom folder as the place where you want to send those emails that are an exact match to your filter, you can select the “Also apply Filter to (no) matching conversations” for exiting emails and leave other criteria. 

Click the “Create filter” button, and a successful message that the filter is successful displays. Check the new label, and you see that the already existing emails from your sender (with subject line) are there, and all incoming mails will go in there automatically.

Wrap Up

As you can see, it is super easy to create folder and organize your emails to receive in the folder automatically. You can explore various other filters available in Gmail to make use of them. This will help to keep important emails from your manager or client in a specific folder and you can quickly find new emails directly looking into the folder. You can use the “Categorize as…” option during filter setup if you want to use default folders (primary, social, updates, forums, and promotions) in Gmail rather than a custom one as used in this guide.