Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Filter Google Calendar Invitation Responses from your Inbox

If you send a lot of calendar invitations, especially for events with a lot of attendees, you may get tired of deleting the emails you get back when someone responds to your meeting invitation.

It's fairly easy to set up a filter in Gmail that will take those response emails out of your inbox, or delete them altogether.

Create a filter for calendar invitation response emails

  1. Copy and paste the following search string in the Gmail search box:
    1. To filter out accepted invitation responses:
      subject:("accepted:") has:attachment *.ics "from google calendar"
    2. To filter out accepted or declined invitation responses:
      subject:"declined:" OR (subject:("accepted:") has:attachment *.ics "from google calendar")
  2. Click the down arrow at the end of the search box to open the advanced search options.
  3. Click "Create filter..." to choose the actions for this filter.

Choose the action(s) to perform when a invitation response email is received



Choose the combination of actions most appropriate for your needs. The following actions make the most sense for this scenario.
  1. Skip the Inbox
    Archive invitation response emails to keep them out of your inbox  (recommended)
  2. Mark as read
  3. Apply a label
    Choose a label to apply to invitation response emails. Consider creating a "calendar invites" label if keeping track of invitation responses is important to you.
  4. Delete
    If you really, really hate those invitation responses.
  5. Also apply filter to ...
    Tick this box to apply these actions to invitation responses already in your inbox.
Click [Create filter] to create your filter.

Any new Google Calendar invitation responses will now be handled according to the actions you selected.

Question

This is just one simple solution to maintain sanity against inbox clutter. How do you use Gmail filters to keep your inbox clean?

1 comment:

  1. This is a great posting. I sent this to the undegrad instructors. THANKS.

    ReplyDelete