Keeping Jots Separate from Email in Gmail

Gmail has a few advanced features that are extra handy when used with Jotter. In this post, we set up Multiple Inboxes and a Filter to keep your Jots where you’ll see them, and not cluttering up your inbox. Once we’re done you’re inbox will keep your reminders in their own space, with your email underneath.

It’s very nice to use and looks a little like this:

Adding Multiple Inboxes

Go to Settings > Labs > Multiple Inboxes and choose Enable. This will turn on Multiple Inboxes with the default settings.

When you enabled Multiple Inboxes, it added a tab to your settings page. Go to Settings > Multiple Inboxes so we can set it up to work with Jotter. You can keep the panes for Starred emails and Drafts if you want. I kept drafts, but since I don’t star emails I removed that one. I replaced it with a pane that shows emails with the label “Jots” and that are unread. The query for this is:

label:jots is:unread

Your settings should look like this:

It’s up to you if you’d like to only show unread jots in the panel (by adding ‘is:unread’ to the query) but with this added, you’ll have a quick reference to any Jot’s you haven’t read — and those you’ve saved for later by marking as Unread.

All your jots, read or unread, will be stored under the label “Jots,” which we make in this next step.

Filtering Jots from Regular Emails

Now that your Gmail window is set to show Jots, we need to tell it what counts as a jot in the first place. All jots are forwarded from your phone to your email by Mijoro’s server. We don’t store any personal data, but the Jots look like they come form Jotter@Mijoro.com. We use this to set up a filter that catches all emails from that address, have them skip the inbox and apply the label “Jots”.

Create a new filter. It should match emails From: Jotter@Mijoro.com.

On the next step, filtered emails need to Skip the Inbox, and should get a New Label, which we call ‘jots‘.

When it’s done, it should look like this:

Now send yourself a Jot and take a look at your inbox.

You should see all your new Jots up top, and the rest of your email is underneath.

Thanks for reading! Let us know what you think of this tip, and what we can do to make Jotter better!