FILTERING EMAIL
Faculty and staff often receive unwanted emails from colleagues. Although free speech protections limit San Diego State University’s ability to stop such messages, you are certainly not obligated to read or respond to them. We have collected below several options if you would like to filter your unwanted, non-University-business email.
If you believe that a given message does rise to the level of hate speech, you can also report it using the Inclusive SDSU reporting system.
1. Mark a message as spam. Note that when you do this the message will be moved to your spam folder. It is likely that future messages from that sender will also go directly to your spam folder; however, it is possible that they will not. The most definitive way to ensure that you never see specific messages is to create your own filter.
2. Create rules to filter your emails
- Open Gmail.
- In the search box at the top, click the Down arrow.
- Enter your search criteria. For example, if you want to filter messages from a particular person, put their email address on the ‘From’ line. If you want to check that your search worked correctly, see what emails show up by clicking Search.
- Note you can also create a filter directly from a message: in the open message, click on the three ‘more’ dots in the upper right corner and select ‘Filter messages like this’. This should populate the search box.
- At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter.
- Choose what you’d like the filter to do (note that deleting messages sends them to Trash; skipping the inbox simply archives the messages without deleting them so you can still retrieve them later).
- Click Create filter.
3. Another alternative is to mute email conversations you are already included on. Muting an email thread will archive all messages in that thread and future messages in the thread will bypass your inbox and be archived immediately. See this article for more information: What is Gmail's mute feature and how to use it effectively.
