When you are dealing with hundreds of emails every day, staying on top of what is important isn’t easy. Common tasks like responding, forwarding, sorting, archiving, deleting, setting reminders, etc., may take a few minutes each but can easily add up to hours of work.
Thankfully, you can automate many of these tasks using built-in Gmail features and third-party apps. Of course, it does require pulling some leavers and setting up some filters, but it’s worth the hours of work you’ll save every week.
In this post, I’ll list a bunch of ways you can automate common tasks in Gmail to save time and, probably, headaches as well.
Automatically Add Signature
Adding your brand signature to emails is a reliable way to increase brand awareness. If you manually add your signature to emails, it will be better to automate the process and add your signature to all new emails and even replies automatically. Here’s how to do it:
Click on the Gear icon and select the See all settings option.
Under the General tab, scroll down to the Signature section. Here under the Signature defaults heading, select your signature in For New Emails Use and/or On Reply/Forward Use options.
This will automatically add your signature to every email you compose or reply to. If you don’t have a signature, you can create one in the same Signature section.
Set Up Filters
The Gmail filtering option lets you apply different actions to incoming emails automatically. You can move emails to a specific folder, archive, delete, forward, and apply other actions without any manual intervention. Here’s how:
Click on the Show search options button at the end of the search bar at the top.
Here you’ll find multiple ways to specify the emails you want to filter, including the sender’s name, words in email, excluded words, subject, attachments, and time period. Fill in these details as you like and click on the Create filter button.
Now you’ll see all the actions that you can apply to both incoming and already stored emails (optional). You can choose multiple actions and if an action prevents another action, then it would be disabled automatically. Once selected, click on Create filter to complete the setup.
You can edit or delete the created filter in the Gmail Settings under the Filters and Blocked addresses tab.
Enable Send and Archive
To keep the inbox clean, you can archive emails that you have already replied to and don’t want it take space in the inbox. You can make this process easier by enabling the option Send and Archive in the Gmail setting that will automatically archive an email once you reply to it.
To do so, go to Gmail Settings and enable the Show “Send & Archive” button in reply option under the General tab.
This will add a new send button when you reply to emails. Just click on it while replying or press Ctrl+Enter keys, this will send a reply to the email and automatically archive it as well.
Use Canned Responses
You can greatly increase email efficiency by creating email templates and using them when a related email comes. It does require a prior setup, but it will greatly increase email efficiency as you can choose a template and an email will be ready to send without you needing to write it.
First, you need to enable it. Go to Gmail Settings and enable the Templates option under the Advanced tab.
To create a template, compose a draft and then click on the More options menu and hover the mouse cursor over Templates. Here you can see created templates and the option Save draft as template.
Next time you need to use a template, just select one from this list, and it will be automatically added as it was saved. Alternatively, you can also use the Canned Responses Ultimate Gmail add-on, which has even better customization and management features.
Use Schedule Send
If you need to send an email at a specific time and it’s out of your schedule or you don’t want to risk forgetting, then you can schedule it to automatically send later. All you have to do is compose the email and click on the arrow next to the Send button and select Schedule send.
Now you can either select recommended timings or click the Pick date & time option to open the calendar and select the exact date and time to automatically send the email later.
You can also try the Right Inbox extension, which has more comprehensive scheduling and reminder features.
Automatically Forward Emails
If you have multiple Gmail accounts, you can make it easier to manage them by automatically forwarding incoming emails from one account to the other to view them in the same place. Here’s how to do it:
In the Gmail Settings, move to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab and click on the Add a forwarding address button.
Here enter the other account’s address and then click on Next and confirm the prompt.
This will send a confirmation code to the other account. You can copy the code from there and paste it here in the Verify windows to start forwarding.
Once verified, you can also customize what happens to the emails in this account once they are sent to the forwarded address.
Set Up Vacation Responder
If you won’t be available to respond to emails, you can set up a vacation responder to automatically reply to let others know you can’t respond and when you’ll be available.
To set up the vacation responder, open Gmail Settings and move to the Vacation responder section under the General tab.
Here you can draft your message and select the responder’s start and end date. You can also select whether it should be automatically sent to all emails or just to people within your contacts.
Make the required changes and click the Save Changes button to activate the vacation responder.
Auto Organize Emails
With the help of the SaneBox online tool, you can automatically organize all your emails using special labels and preset rules. The tool automatically creates special labels to organize all your existing and new emails so you can focus on what is important.
Some of the labels include news, later, delete later, no spam, no reply, attachments, and folders to snooze emails. Using this, you can do basic things like automatically snooze less important emails for later or get reminders to follow up on emails you didn’t get a reply on.
You can also train the tool by manually moving emails to a specific folder, and it will remember to next time send those emails to that specific folder.
To set up, you’ll have to give SaneBox the right to manage your Gmail account and then go through the step-by-step setup process. Once done, it will automatically apply changes to your inbox without the need to download/install any software.
You’ll get a 15-day free trial to try the service, and then you’ll have to upgrade to one of the pro subscriptions to keep using it.
Automatically Extract Data from Emails
Extracting data from incoming emails can be very useful for businesses to manage invoices, expenses, orders, and support tickets. I am sure even regular users can take advantage of it by extracting information like subscriptions, receipts/invoices, and event plans.
For this purpose, Mailparser is a great tool that extracts information based on user-set rules. The tool gives you a unique email address where you can forward emails. It will extract specific information from those emails automatically based on your set rules.
You can use rules like keywords, position, pattern, header data, attachments, etc. to ensure it extracts only required data. Once extracted, this data can be moved to a spreadsheet or a supported CRM software.
It has a free version where you can extract data from 30 emails per month. For a higher number of emails, you’ll need to get a respective pro subscription that can handle your needs.
Use an All-In-One Automation Tool
For the ultimate automated experience, you’ll need a dedicated Gmail automation solution. I recommend Zapier, mainly because other automation tools are limited to scheduling and filtering mostly. Although Zapier’s main focus is to automate tasks between 5000+ different apps, I am going to focus on its Gmail automation here.
Using simple “If This, Then That” rules, you can create unlimited rules to automate Gmail tasks. Below I am listing some possible ways you can automate Gmail tasks:
- Automatically save attachments to your favorite cloud storage.
- Create tasks from new emails and automatically send them to supported apps like Trello.
- Send new emails with specific criteria to team messaging apps like Slack to automatically notify team members.
- Save data from specific types of emails in Google Sheets. Great for form submissions or surveys.
- Initiate automatic action on an email by manually marking it as read or starred.
- Send an email based on a trigger in a different app, like receiving a file in Slack or an event starting on Google Calendar.
- If someone new contacts you, add their details automatically in your CRM software.
- Create Google Calendar events from new emails like bookings and invitations.
- Create to-do lists from new emails and send them to supported apps like Todoist.
- Send vacation responses to emails from specific people or containing specific information.
Zapier has a fully functional 15-day free trial, after which you’ll have to upgrade to one of the paid plans.
Ending Words 🖋️
All of Gmail’s automation features are very useful, but I particularly like the filtering feature as it can be used in unexpectedly unique ways to boost efficiency. For example, sending emails with attachments to a specific label or email or a canned response to specific emails automatically.
I will also recommend you to mess around in Zapier, the 15-day free trial is enough to possibly find a way to save hours of work.
Next, you may explore some Gmail Settings to get the best experience.