Simple Gmail Filter Trick That Catches 99% of Newsletters

If you're setting up Gmail auto-forwarding to Remy (or any other email management tool), you might be wondering: Is there an easy way to catch all newsletters without creating dozens of individual filters?

The answer is yes—and it's surprisingly simple.

The Magic Keyword: "unsubscribe"

Here's the trick: Create a single Gmail filter using the keyword unsubscribe.

That's it. This one word will catch approximately 99% of newsletters automatically.

Why Does This Work?

Email regulations (like CAN-SPAM in the US and GDPR in Europe) require legitimate newsletters to include an unsubscribe link in every email they send. This means nearly every newsletter contains the word "unsubscribe" somewhere in its content—usually in the footer.

By filtering for this keyword, you're essentially filtering for emails that self-identify as newsletters.

How to Set It Up

Setting this up in Gmail takes just a minute:

1. Open Gmail and click the Settings gear icon
2. Go to "See all settings" → "Filters and Blocked Addresses"
3. Click "Create a new filter"
4. In the "Has the words" field, type: unsubscribe
5. Click "Create filter"
6. Check "Forward it to" and select your Remy inbox address
7. Optionally check "Skip the Inbox" to keep your Gmail clean
8. Click "Create filter"

That's it! Now Gmail will automatically forward nearly all newsletters to your Remy inbox for AI summarization.

What About False Positives?

You might worry about catching emails that aren't newsletters. In practice, this is rarely an issue because:

• Personal emails almost never contain the word "unsubscribe"
• Work emails from colleagues don't include unsubscribe links
• Important transactional emails (receipts, confirmations) might have unsubscribe links, but they're usually welcome in your newsletter digest anyway

If you do want to be more selective, you can always create additional filters with more specific criteria, or use Gmail's filter exclude syntax to skip certain senders.

Take It Further

Want to get even more sophisticated? You can combine this with other filter criteria:

• Exclude specific senders: Add -from:important@company.com to skip certain addresses
• Only from certain domains: Add from:substack.com to catch only Substack newsletters
• Subject line keywords: Combine with subject:newsletter for even more precision

But honestly? For most people, the simple unsubscribe filter works perfectly on its own.

Ready to Try Remy?

If you haven't set up your Remy account yet, now's the perfect time. With this one simple filter, you can start getting AI-powered summaries of all your newsletters in one daily digest.

Check out our complete Gmail auto-forwarding guide for step-by-step instructions.

---

Have other Gmail filtering tips or questions about setting up Remy? Reach out to us at hello@remyreads.nl