Gmail’s new filter feature - “mark as read”
I don’t believe it! Gmail has made an addition to their filter options! Now when you are setting up a filter to divert email to a label, you can have Gmail automatically mark the email as read :
So what are the advantages of this? Well for a start, I automate a lot of backups to be emailed to me each day. This blog for example is backed up by a Wordpress plugin and emailed to me. I also get backups of my Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg accounts emailed to me. These bypass the inbox, thanks to a filter, and sit in a label.
But before they would sit there unread and I had to go to each email and mark them as read. This was irritating and tedious as you can imagine. But now…..Gmail can automatically and quietly mark them as read when they come in and I need never know they are there. This is excellent therefore for emails that arrive purely as backup and you don’t need to actually open the email unless you need the backup later.
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February 20th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Thanks for the tip. I’m glad they’ve finally included the ability to do this.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
I still can’t see this option. Do you have to do anything to obtain this new option?
February 20th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Ian : you need the new Gmail first of all. Then go to your settings and the “create a filter” area. If you begin the steps to make a new filter, the “mark as read” option should be there.
It is possible that Gmail is slowly rolling this out to groups of people at a time though. So you may have to wait. Plus it probably isn’t available for anyone still using the old version of Gmail.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I’m confused why the older Gmail accounts would never be equipped with this feature, where did you get that information?
My latest Gmail account has this function since several months now, and it really is a very useful feature (well, in some way, for some of us). My first Gmail account however never received the possibility to do this. Having experience with other email providers, I compared some of the settings - particularly the localization. It was configured to be ‘English (UK)’ at that account, while the newer one had ‘English (US)’ in it’s settings. Changing that to ‘English (US)’ as well was enough to enable that nice feature I was willing to enable on that account.
Something that is worth mentioning when talking about this feature, imo.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Hi Laurens : friends of mine with old Gmail accounts (those who didn’t get upgraded until the very last minute) have told me that they didn’t have the “mark as read” feature with their old accounts. However when they got their new shiny Gmail 2.0 accounts, the feature was suddenly there.
As for me, I stumbled upon it purely by accident when I was setting up a label for a tutorial I was writing.
It seems that the US accounts got the feature right away while the European and Asian accounts had to wait an absolute eternity. I don’t understand the logic in that - giving the US users everything right away and stiffing the other users.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Ah, thanks for clearing that up :-).
I also miss the point why a small feature of an online service shouldn’t be released for all localizations, especially if Europeans can set it to US English as well. There could be many reasons, but on the other hand, I can’t think of any sound reasons in this case.
In the end I don’t have much difficulties with it. Most of the online services/software applications I use are in English, because I like that the most (although I’m Belgian/Flemish, and so Dutch is my main language).
March 5th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Yes it does kind of defeat the purpose of having region-specific features if everyone can switch to region-specific languages isn’t it? I am British and in Germany but I have been using the US English version of Gmail since day one.
Dutch being your native language, let me just say your English is excellent. I envy your bi-lingual talents.