MyMail Filters

How do I automatically filter and delete a message sent from a specific e-mail address?

I often have people ask me how to filter messages sent to Mailman lists. Filters can be dangerous so please use them with caution.  A bad filter rule can easily wipe out your entire inbox!
Even though this was written with filtering Mailman posts in mind the information can be used for any sender, subject, or text in the body of a message.

Since there are many different messages sent to the lists it is sometimes impossible to unsubscribe from the list without missing an e-mail that may have been important.  There are some times where you may not want to see any e-mails from a particular e-mail address.  Here is a quick and easy way to never see them in your inbox.  There are many ways of doing this task but here is one example.

Click on the message you wish to filter from your inbox

Under the More Actions tab select Filter messages like these.

There are six criteria you can filter on. If you only wish to target a particular person or subject then there will be three criteria you will be interested in.  Those are the From, Subject, and Has the words.

If you only want to delete messages that are sent from one particular e-mail address simply enter that e-mail address you want to filter in the From box. You can fine tune the filter by adding additional criteria such as a subject phrase or using the has the words field to search for words in the body of the message.  For now, we just want to stop messages from a particular e-mail address showing up in the inbox so click Next Step after entering the sender’s e-mail address in the From field.

On the next page you want to select Mark as read AND Delete it.  This will automatically delete the message and prevent a unread message count being added to your Trash items.   If you want to apply this filter to messages already in your inbox select Also apply filter to conversations below.  Click Create filter.  That’s it.  From now on any message from that e-mail address will automatically be deleted and not show as an unread message. 

If you would like to learn more about filtering in Google Mail there are many great videos on Youtube showing how to work with filters.