Using Gmail Labels to Filter Incoming Emails to Slack

Your Slack channel can get pretty cluttered when unnecessary or unhelpful emails come in. Thankfully, with SharedInbox you can leverage Gmail labels to filter what emails show up in Slack. This can help you and your team cut through the noise and focus on managing the emails that actually matter.

In this article, we’ll show you how to select which Gmail labels to use when syncing email to your SharedInbox Slack channels.

As an example, let’s say we frequently get marketing emails from some company that we don’t need to see in Slack. We’ll create a Gmail label and filter these marketing emails to automatically assign a label.

Finally, we’ll update our SharedInbox channel settings so any emails with this label will not be posted to Slack. If you already have labels set up in Gmail, you can skip to the last section below.

Create a Gmail Label #

You’ll first need to open up Gmail and create a label on the left sidebar. Enter a name and click Create:

The new label will show up under Labels on the left sidebar in Gmail. You can also create nested labels to keep things organized.

Create a rule to automatically assign a label #

There are a variety of different rules you can use when creating message filters in Gmail, but we’ll keep our filter simple: When emails come in from this From address, apply the Marketing label.

1. Select an email from your Inbox and click the three dots menu at the top
2. Select Filter messages like these
3. Set your search criteria – we’ll just use the default which has the From address as the search/filter criteria
4. Click Create filter
5. On the next page, select Apply the label, and select our Marketing label. You can also select Also apply filter to X matching conversations, if you want to have Gmail go back and label old/existing messages that match.
6. Click Create filter

So now, any new emails that come into your Inbox that match this filter rule will automatically be assigned the Marketing label. Now we can use this label to help clean up our shared email inbox in Slack!

Choose which Emails go to your SharedInbox Slack Channel #

To filter out which emails should show up in your Slack channel:

Steps #

1. Login to your SharedInbox dashboard
2. Click the email under Connections on the left sidebar
3. Click the Settings tab
4. Under Gmail Labels to Sync to Slack, select the email labels that should be posted to your Slack channel
5. Click Update

By unchecking the Marketing label, any new email that you receive that Gmail labels as Marketing will not be synced to your SharedInbox Slack channel. In other words, you will still receive the email in your Gmail inbox, but it will not show up in your Slack channel.

The Sync unlabeled emails option allows you to sync any new email messages to Slack that do not have a specific label associated with them. We recommended keeping this checked if you’re not sure, so you don’t miss any emails that don’t get labeled by Gmail.