Going through huge amounts of email everyday can be a monotonous task, especially if one gets lost in the shuffle. If you are constantly dragging your new emails into folders so you can keep things categorized, you really should be automating that. By automating this task, I have saved at least one hour per day, leaving my work days to more important things.

First you are going to need Mozilla Thunderbird, you can perform this same technique with Microsoft’s Outlook, but I will be focusing on Thunderbird. If you don’t have Thunderbird yet, you can go to their website and download it for free (http://www.mozillamessaging.com/thunderbird). If you haven’t used Thunderbird yet, I highly recommend trying it out.

Next, we are going to take a look at your folders, finding a way to automate new emails that are already in those folders, to go in there from now on. Locate the folder your most popular folder that you constantly place emails in, and let’s start there. Open up a text editor and copy and paste all of the email addresses that are in that folder (we’ll come to that later).

Fire up Thunderbird and go to TOOLS and click MESSAGE FILTERS (as seen in the picture below).

Tools --> Message Filters

You are now greeted with the Message Filters window, which is displayed below.

Message Filters Content Window

Now if you have multiple email addresses, you are going to have to change the email at the top of the box, in order to correspond with the email you want the filter added to. Now that you have the email selected, you need to click on the button labeled NEW. You are now greeted with the following window:

New Filter

The first field labeled “Filter Name” is going to be your label for your filter, so you can remember it later.

The next field is “For incoming messages that,” we are going to click “Match any of the following” (which should already be highlighted) and move to the next line.

Click on the drop down menu that says “Subject” and choose “From”. This is applying the filter to an email address. Leave the field “contains” alone and open up your text editor and enter in your first email address on the list. Now if would like more than one email to be filtered and stored in the same folder, click the “+” sign and do excactly what you did with the first email. Once you have all of your email addresses entered (remember we’re only working on one folder at a time), now it is time to tell Thunderbird what you want it to do with these future emails that you recieve.

The field that says “Move message to,” you can leave alone. Select the field to the right of “Move Message to” and find the folder that you wish to use for the filter.

Now press Ok.

If you own many email addresses, and emails that you would like filtered go to both of your addresses, you need to perform the steps over again for each account.

Now, for every email that you filtered, it will now automatically be inserted into the folder you assigned.

Congratulations, you have now automated one more task in your life and if you’re like me, you will be saving yourself a considerable amount of time. Doesn’t it feel great to have an empty inbox?

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Do you have any tips, suggestions, or add-ons that you recommend for helping automate email?