Rivitid

Don’t worry – this is not a post about how to delete spam. We know how to do that.

What spurred this post into action was a tweet by Robert Scoble:

For those who can’t see the embed above, Robert wanted a one-click solution to removing FacebookFacebook, FoursquareFoursquare etc. notifications from GmailGmail.

Clearly there’s a demand for this – as Robert isn’t the first person I’ve heard voice this concern. So I wanted to see what the quickest way to get rid of all your notifications at once! This is the method I concocted. It’s still longer than a 1-click solution, but it beats the hell out of reporting every email to spam one at a time!

1. Go to the “Filters” Setting page

The first thing you need to do is log in to Gmail, go to “Settings” in the top-right side of the screen, click on the “Filters” tab. Once you’re in Filters, you should click “Create New Filter.”

Now, what makes this post relevant at all is that instead of creating a different filter for every type of email you want to remove, we’re going to create one filter that will remove all emails you don’t want – based on the address they’re coming from!

2. Select the Notifications You Want to Remove

This is the fun part. The way google works is based on queries. This means, that the tool you’re looking at now can be used to filter emails, and you can not only delete them, but also save them, label them, favorite them – really, do anything! So the page you’re looking at is the page where GoogleGoogle asks you “what is them?”

In our case, we want to delete Notifications from Foursquare, Facebook, and I want to delete pesky emails from some spammer, too.

Google is a search engine before everything else. So you can use search operations to put multiple criteria in one box! So here’s what we’ll do:

In the “From” section, we’ll type:

notification+zsyt_ac@facebookmail.com OR noreply@foursquare.com OR CareerOpportunity@email4-beyond.com

Feel free to exchange these email addresses for the ones you want to remove. This tells Google that you’re talking about emails that are coming from these addresses. Now notice that you’ll still receive other emails from Facebook, for instance – because we’re only blocking the “Notifications” emails.

3. Tell Google What to Do with the Notifications

Now that we’ve told Google what emails we want to do something to, let’s tell Google what we want to do with them!

You should be looking at this screen:

As you can see, you can still tell Google that you want these to be your favorites! We need to let Google know we want nothing to do with these notifications anymore. The way we do this, is by simply selecting to have them skip the inbox, and be deleted.

That’s it! All done! You can repeat this process anytime you get a regular stream of unwanted notifications from some site you signed up for. If you know of a lab or a technique that’s quicker or more efficient, let me know as well!

Did this work for you?

Popularity: 2% [?]