Ten minutes now saves you a weekend in April
Picture next April. You sit down to do your taxes, and the form asks what you spent last year on electricity, trash, water, and gas. Four companies sent you roughly twelve bills each, and all 48 sit scattered through a year of email.
Digging them out by hand costs an afternoon, and a missed bill puts a wrong number on your return. Today your bills land in your inbox with everything else. After the work below, each bill files itself into a single tax folder, and year-end reporting means opening that folder and adding up four totals.
Build four email rules so every utility bill files itself into one tax folder
This takes about ten minutes, once.
- Find one recent bill email from each company: electricity, trash, water, gas.
- Create a label (Gmail) or folder (Outlook) named “Taxes 2026.”
- Build one rule per sender:
- Gmail: open the bill, click the three dots, choose “Filter messages like these,” then “Create filter,” and check “Apply the label.”
- Outlook: right-click the bill, choose “Rules,” then “Create rule,” and set it to move messages from that sender into your folder.
- Apply each rule to existing mail so this year’s earlier bills move over too.
Check the folder when a bill arrives, total it once a year
- When a bill arrives: glance at the tax folder and confirm the bill landed there. Five seconds.
- Every January 1: create the new year’s folder and point the four rules at it. Five minutes.
- At tax time: open the folder, total each utility, and enter the four numbers.
I learned this one the slow way, searching my inbox bill by bill.
Some additional gmail automation notes:
Gmail calls tags “labels,” and filters apply them automatically.
Create a filter that applies a label
- In Gmail on the web, click the slider icon at the right edge of the search bar (Show search options).
- Fill in the properties to match: From, To, Subject, Has the words, Doesn’t have, Size, Has attachment.
- Click Create filter (bottom of that panel).
- Check Apply the label, then pick an existing label or choose New label.
- Optional: check Also apply filter to matching conversations to label existing mail too.
- Click Create filter.
Shortcut from an existing email: open the message, click the three-dot menu, choose Filter messages like these. Gmail pre-fills the sender.
Matching more precise properties
The “Has the words” field accepts any Gmail search operator, so you can match on far more than the form fields offer:
{term1 term2} is shorthand for OR, and a space between terms means AND
from:(alice@example.com OR bob@example.com) matches either sender
list:announce@example.com matches a mailing list
filename:pdf or filename:invoice matches attachment type or name
subject:(invoice OR receipt) matches either subject word
to:me+shopping@gmail.com matches a plus-address you gave out
larger:5M matches by size
-from:boss@example.com excludes a sender