How To Bypass The Spam Folder In Gmail

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I never liked the idea of the Gmail spam folder. I was constantly finding things in there that didn’t belong. I even missed out on a few really good work opportunities because the emails landed in the spam folder and I didn’t notice.

Eventually I decided to try to bypass my spam folder, so that I could actually see each email in my inbox and not miss anything else. It took a few tries, but I figured it out, and I’ve been bypassing my spam folder for about five years.

When I first did this, there was a lot of spam to keep up with. But since then Gmail has gotten a lot better at filtering out the spam. Most days I only get a few spam messages out of hundreds. And I never miss legit messages that used to hide in my spam folder.

Of course, I can no longer use that folder as an excuse. “Sorry, it was in my spam folder!” :-)

So how do you do it? By setting up a simple filter.

[bctt tweet=”If you’ve ever missed an important email because it went to spam, you need to read this!” username=”AmyOztan”]

First, go to “Settings” (click on the little gear icon in the top right of Gmail to find “Settings) then the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab.

If you already have some filters, scroll to the bottom of the page until you see “Create a new filter.”

In the “Has the words” box enter is:spam

Click “Create filter with this search.”

If you see a warning, click “OK.”

On the next page, check the box “Never send it to spam” and click “Create filter” (do not click “Also apply filter to XX matching conversations”).

That’s it!

Of course, your spam folder is still there, and you want it to be there. You can still manually mark emails as spam and send them to the spam folder yourself, and that helps let Gmail know what is actually spam, so that they can improve their filters.