How to auto-label your mail

Auto-labelling is about one outcome: an inbox that holds only the mail that needs you, with receipts, newsletters and notifications filed under labels you can open when you want them. Sortmail gets you there on the day you connect, for every sender, without a single filter to write.

How Sortmail labels your mail

Sortmail sorts every incoming message into one of five categories: Actionable, Personal, Receipts, Newsletters and System. You can rename them, recolour them or add your own, up to 8. Actionable and Personal stay in your inbox. The rest get an ordinary Gmail label, such as Sortmail/Receipts, and are archived: out of the inbox, still under the label and in All Mail. On Outlook they become categories of the same name.

• New senders are labelled on arrival. The first receipt from a shop you have never bought from goes to Receipts, with nobody writing anything.
• Every message shows why it was labelled: one of your rules, a signal in its headers, the model or your own correction, with how confident the decision was.
• A correction is a rule. Move a message to the right category and every later message from that sender follows it. On Gmail, moving it between Sortmail labels in any Gmail app counts too.
• The labels live in your mailbox, so the Gmail app, Outlook, your phone and the web all show the same quieter inbox.
• Nothing is deleted and nothing is sent. Sortmail only labels and archives, and every move can be undone.

Your rules decide first. If none matches, a mailing-list or automated-sender header can settle it. Only then does a language model read a short, masked extract, and you can switch that off per mailbox. Message bodies are never stored.

The manual method, in brief

Gmail can apply labels itself with a filter: a saved search with an action attached. It is free, and for a few steady senders it does the job. Here is the short version, on Gmail in a desktop browser, because the mobile apps cannot create filters.

Create the labels

1. In the left-hand sidebar, scroll to Labels and click the plus sign beside it.
2. Type a name, such as Receipts, Newsletters or Notifications, and click Create.
3. Repeat for each label. Name them by kind of mail, not by sender.

Write the search, then the filter

Click the sliders icon at the right-hand end of the search bar. Fill in only what you need and press Search first: the results are exactly what the filter will catch. Some searches that work well:

from:(example.com)

list:(news.example.com)

subject:(receipt OR invoice OR "order confirmation" OR "payment received")

The first catches every address at one company. The second matches a newsletter’s mailing-list header, which you find under "Show original" in the three-dot menu, in the List-Id line. The third catches common receipt wording. OR must be in capitals, and phrases go in quotes.

1. With the search options open, click "Create filter".
2. Tick "Apply the label" and choose a label.
3. Tick "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)" if you do not need to see the mail arrive.
4. Tick "Also apply filter to matching conversations" to label the mail you already have, then click "Create filter".

Gmail’s inbox tabs do a rougher version of this without filters. They are fixed categories you cannot rename or add to, there is no Receipts tab, and nothing tells you why a message landed where it did.

Where the manual method breaks

Filters match only what you anticipated. Every limit follows from that, and each one turns into upkeep you do for as long as you use them:

• New senders are missed. Every shop you buy from for the first time sends a receipt your filters have never heard of. It lands in the inbox until you notice and add the domain.
• Changes break them. When a company moves to a new sending address or rewords its subject line, the filter silently stops matching.
• They cannot tell apart two messages from one place. A colleague at a company and that company’s automated notices share a domain, so a filter catches both or neither.
• They cannot read meaning. "Can you look at this by Friday?" has no keyword a filter can rely on, so the mail that most needs you gets no help.
• They overlap without warning. Every matching filter runs, in no order you control, and nothing tells you when two conflict.
• They never explain themselves. When a message goes somewhere odd, you find out why by reading the whole filter list.

That is the real price of free filters: an edit every time your mail changes, which in most inboxes is every week.

What changes when Sortmail does it

• Setup is connecting a mailbox. The five categories are ready, and your last month is sorted before you pay.
• New senders cost you nothing. They are sorted by what the mail is, not by whether a search anticipated them.
• You fix mistakes by moving a message, not by editing a search. The fix applies to that sender from then on.
• You can see every decision. The Overrides screen lists every rule your corrections created, and you can remove any of them.
• A daily digest, at the hour you choose, shows what stayed in your inbox and what was filed and why.

See your own mail labelled

Connect a mailbox and Sortmail sorts the last 30 days of your inbox (up to 1,000 messages) free, showing where each message would go and why. It is a preview rather than a trial: nothing is written to your mailbox, no labels and no archiving, until you choose a plan. You judge it on your own mail before you pay anything.

One plan, with every feature in it: $8.99 a month, $79 a year or $139 for 2 years at the founding price, limited to the first 500 subscribers and locked for as long as the subscription runs. A year costs less than 9 months of monthly, and 2 years less than 16. After the founding seats it is $12.99 a month, $99 a year or $169 for 2 years. Cancel in one click in Billing.