---
title: Automatically sort social networking notifications in your Gmail
date: 2009-03-11
topics: email,Gmail
---

•figure["/posts/img/image202.jpg" #:width "200"]{My inbox, full of
[bacn](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14032271)}

If you’re like a lot of people nowadays, notification emails from Twitter and
Facebook and their ilk have rapidly overtaken your “real” personal
correspondence in terms of sheer bulk. It’s not spam, but if you want to still
get these emails then you could probably use a way to deal with it more
efficiently. What I do in GMail is use a filter. Any email from social
networking sites is given the “social” label and archived, but left unread. This
means the email never lands in my inbox with the rest of my mail, but I can
still quickly see if there are any new messages and read them separately if I
like. In GMail, go to Settings, then Filters, then click Create a new filter at
the bottom. Use the following text in the “Has Words” field:

```
from:{ facebookmail.com twitter.com vimeo.com facebookappmail.com linkedin.com flickr.com }
```

Set it to *Skip inbox* and *Apply label: social* (or whatever label you choose
to create for the purpose). Make sure you add in any domains of social
networking sites you use that aren’t already incuded above! I’m not the first
one to figure this out and [everyone has their own
method](http://lifehacker.com/291688/how-do-you-handle-bacn), but I thought I’d
leave it here for anyone who might find it handy.