How to create rules in Gmail

Rules are actually called Filters in Gmail, let's learn how to create them and use them with labels.

Login to you Gmail account.

Click the Settings button and choose Settings (see picture).

Click Filters and click Create a new filter.

Now enter your filter criteria.

You can enter an an From or To email, meaning the filter will trigger  as you get an email from a specific person or when you will send an email to specific person you enter. It's pretty much same for other criteria (To, Subject, Has the words, Doesn't have). You can enter as many criteria fields as you want. For instance: if you enter an email like batman@batcave.com in to From field and Dreevoo into Has the words field, then this filter will be triggered only if you get an email sent from batman@batcave.com and that email has the word Dreevoo included. Get the picture?

At this time I will only enter From criteria field.

When done with entering your criteria, click Create filter with this search.

Now you have bunch of options on what should happen when you get or send the email with the criteria you entered.

For instance, you can Mark this email as read, put a star on it, forward it to another email address, delete it, mark it as important and so on. Let's apply a label on it.

Choose Apply the label option and Choose label...

You can click here if you want to know more about labels in Gmail.

You can choose between one of your existing labels or create a new label. I'm going to create a new one...

Enter name of your new label and click Create.

If there are some existing emails with the criteria you entered in Step 3 and you want to apply this filter on these mails as well just select the Also apply filter to ... matching conversations option.

Click Create filter.

From now on all the new emails matching your criteria will be marked with the label you chose.

And if you chose the Also apply filter... option, all the existing emails that match your criteria, should now be labeled as well.

If you now click the label you applied to your new filter, then you should get all the labeled emails listed.

It's a great feature, personally I use it a lot.