Take Control of your Digg Shouts with Gmail

About a couple weeks ago, I wrote about how my Digg shouts were getting out of hand & taking over my inbox. Well, I’ve finally figured out a way to put an end to my Digg shout madness! I know this isn’t the only way but, it’s the way I’ve found to be most helpful to me.

The first thing I did was to switch my email from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail. In doing so, not only did I find a way to filter out Digg shouts but, I also found a more reliable & customizable email client. I’ll be talking about some of the reasons to switch from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail in my next post.

The second thing I did was to figure out two simple features in Gmail, labels & filters. Labels are equivalent to folders in Yahoo! Mail & you can create as many as you’d like. Filters allow you to specify the criteria you’d like to use for determining what to do with a message as it arrives.

So, I created a label called “Digg” & then created a filter to send all email messages from Digg (noreply@digg.com) to that “Digg” label. I also made sure the messages would skip the inbox completely & be immediately archived (to the “Digg” label) as soon as they are received.

Step by step instructions on creating labels & filters in Gmail:

• Click on settings in the upper right hand corner.
• Click on the “Labels” menu heading.
• Create a new label by typing a title in the text box & clicking on create. Your label has now been created & can be seen in your Gmail sidebar.
• Click on the “Filters” menu heading.
• Click on create a new filter.
• Choose your search criteria such as a “from” email (noreply@digg.com for Digg), “to” email, subject, ect. You can put in as much or as little as you like. Only a “from” email should be needed even though, if you have mail being forwarded from other email addresses (like I do), you might want to put in a “to” email as well just to specify.
• Click on next step.
• Choose the action(s) you would like applied to the incoming email messages. For my Digg shouts, I choose “Skip the inbox” & “Apply the label” (choosing the label I created from the drop down).
• Click on create filter & you’re all down.

Now your inbox won’t be crowded with all those Digg shouts or any other messages that you choose to filter; they’ll go straight to the specified label.

What’s even better is that Gmail will group together all messages from the same title & the number of messages in a group is displayed as well. So, you can see which people are sending you too many Digg shouts & take action!

So, what do you think of this solution? Is it useful?

[tags]digg, digg shouts, gmail, labels, filters, email labels, email filters[/tags]

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