Back to School Tech Tips: Email Labeling and Auto Filtering

This article is the third of four articles in regard to how to set up your new debate season and back-to-school experience for success. You can find part 1 at the link here and part 2 at the link here. Look at our website tomorrow to read our last article in this series. 

This article is generally Gmail-specific, but generally speaking, all these tips ought to be equally useful for other email accounts and/or email managers such as Outlook or Apple Mail. If you are not using Gmail, do not fret about the specifics related to Gmail. Look up whether there is an equivalent for your particular email accounts and/or email managers, and then read the article to learn how to integrate these features to make debate easier as applicable.

Overview of Email Tips and Relevancy per Debate Event

For debaters, there are generally three key email organization tips in regards to scheduled emails/calendar reminders, labels/filters, and email chain advice. 

However, the third section might not be valuable to you depending on how your debate circuit operates. The degree that you are involved in circuit/progressive debate events with good disclosure norms alters the degree that I would implement some of these tips. Policy debaters and progressive LD debaters who regularly use email chains ought to read to the end, but most other debaters should stop reading at the section titled “email chain tips.” For reference, ironically for website search-engine-optimization reasons means that it is the worst possible decision for me to advise you to not read till the end, meaning Google systemically encourages me to waste your time, and punishes my website for not doing that. However, that’s remarkably stupid, and I have wasted enough of your time explaining how I am not wasting your time.

Scheduled Emails and Email Calendar Reminders

Similar to our previous article on calendar reminders, most email managers like Gmail have the option to schedule email to be automatically sent at a specific point in the future. Humorously, I have exploited this when I had to surgically remove my tonsils, and spammed my mother’s phone with scheduled messages while I was unconscious in the hospital. Hypothetically, I could have died on the operating table and they’d still be receiving messages from a dead person’s phone. For the sake of all mothers’ everywhere, please don’t do this (or at least don’t blame us for the idea).

These are great examples of the power of scheduled emails, as it allows you to send emails in the future, such as when you are incapacitated (like getting your an organ removed to not routinely choke on chicken) or when you’re not actively thinking about an issue. If you need to hedge your bets and hope you will remember to do something in the future when there are no action-items available to do now, outsource your planning. There is no point thinking about the issue until a time in the future when something can be done and it becomes more relevant. 

Calendars are an option for future reminders, and you can set up your calendar to automatically email you as well. However, if that isn’t an amicable method for you, add scheduled reminders via sending yourself a scheduled email in the future. At the start of each semester, I add scheduled email reminders to stress the importance of specific deadlines to my future self. This is because I generally am more likely to check my email than a planner, and the fact that emails keep their unread status if not addressed. For instance, If a high-percentage class exam or college entrance exam is on such-and-such date like October 18th, set up scheduled email reminders to yourself to encourage yourself to study on specific dates (i.e. once a week for upcoming weeks until the exam, and then a more intense study schedule the week of the exam). 

Scheduled emails also help group cooperation and coordination. For instance, you can set up email reminders to be sent to every practice debate participant to increase the likelihood they’ll show up to practice and be prepared. Similarly, schedule an email to be sent the day before a deadline for something like pre-tournament prep work in order to remind everyone to start working on their assignment if they’ve forgotten. In circumstances like these, if you are team leadership, you don’t necessarily need to remember the day before an event that you need to send out a reminder to everyone that the event will take place tomorrow. Unless you have something that cannot be done when initially planning the event, pre-schedule your reminders to others, and don’t unnecessarily set a reminder for yourself in order for you to be reminded of your obligation for you to remind others. If a reminder is necessary, don’t burden yourself with an extra obligation to remember to remind them, as scheduled emails allow automating the task of reminding them.

Of course, a shared team calendar can automate reminding large groups of people about shared events or obligations. However, sometimes some people don’t like online calendar management. In contrast, emails are more respected and commonplace, and for many people it’s considered weird to not check your email. Your email reminders are something you can independently send to people irrespective of whether they use Google Calendar. I understand that this article is specific to emails, but for Android message users, you can also send scheduled text messages by hold selecting the “send” button and then scheduling a time when you want to text someone.

Labels Overview and Example Breakdown

As a general practice, sort your emails with labels to subcategorize and organize at a level beyond the top-level categories of primary, promotions, social, and updates. This principle applies to both your debate emails AND your non-debate emails, as if your email inbox is sorted well, you’re less likely to miss important notifications about tournament info or waste time searching for an old email chain.

Let’s work through an example by making labels for each of your classes, and then make filters in order to automatically label emails related to a class with its corresponding label. At the end of this example, if you have six classes, you should have six labels, and emails related to those classes will automatically be labeled with your filters so that you can sort by each class. I will leave the additional email filter options for you to implement on your own, but I will give you some recommendations of suggested email filters.

On the bottom left of your Gmail page is a list of your email labels (it’s likely currently empty). Create and rename labels for each of your classes and then recolor them with easily differentiable and distinct colors. 

To manually add labels, drag and drop emails from your inbox onto the relevant label to categorize it. Alternatively, select the checkbox next to one email and select more emails with their respective checkboxes as needed. Then select the “more” button (shown with the three stacked dots) on the top, and then select “label as” to add your labels

All things considered, email filtering takes some work BUT if you’re being efficient, most of email filtering can be done automatically, and this is stupidly easy to do with filters. After you’ve created your labels, go to the top-right of Gmail and press the settings button, select “see all settings,” and then head to the “filters and blocked addresses” tab. Finally, select the button “Create a new filter.”

Filters have multiple usages like auto-deleting spam emails or automatically forwarding it to a friend, but for our purposes, we will be using filters to automatically label emails based on whether an email is from a specific email address or if it contains specific terms. Sometimes this process requires some minor manual (re)sorting, but generally auto filters are pretty effective.

Let’s go through the process of making a few filters so that each class has its own filter, with that filtering being the key element that automates the labeling process for emails related to that class. 

Generally, I filter emails either by the “has the words” or “from” filters. Find an email filter set up that works for emails from multiple sources, such as from Google Classroom/Canvas, your teacher, and/or applications specifically used by that class (i.e. Desmos for math classes). 

If all class emails consistently use certain terminology in all their emails, such as the title of the class, use the “has the words” filter. However, if the terminology is inconsistent, make a list of all the email addresses related to the class, and add those emails to the “from” filter. For the former, in the case of a  teacher that always writes in emails the term “AP Government,” even in different contexts, use the “has the words” filter. But, if she uses another program that doesn’t use the term “AP Government,” or forwards generic emails from Collegeboard which doesn’t specifically mention “AP Government,” those won’t be included in that “has the words” filter, so you need a more expansive “has the words” filter OR to use a different filter like the “from” filter that would be inclusive of emails from Collegeboard, Google Classroom/Canvas, and your teacher directly.

Filters are imperfect, and you need to consider whether you want loose labels that increase the risk of wrongful/incorrect labeling, or strict labels that increase the amount of manual sorting you need to do. Ask yourself whether the amount of manual sorting necessary is a big enough problem to warrant screwing around with filters, or is this ~2 one-off emails that manual sorting is better capable of solving.

Other Label Tips

Let’s add a few extra labels now that we’ve worked through our initial example:

Debate Label: A catch-all debate email label is worthwhile. However, debate as a subject has two key issues with filters that make it hard to avoid false positives. Each speech doc includes possibly every word under the sun (especially space topics which literally involve the sun) and email chains include a variety of unpredictable addresses that cannot be all included in a “from” filter. Both issues make the “has the words” and “from” filters more error-prone and less usable. However, one option is to use debate specific terminology like speech names or break rounds in combination with a “has the words” filter. 

An example is below:

"1AC" OR "1NC" OR "aff" OR "neg" OR "r1" OR "r2" OR "r3" OR "r4" OR "r5" OR "r6" OR "r7" OR "r8" OR "octos" OR "doubles" OR "quarters" OR "semis" OR "finals"

Alternatively, add a debate-specific modifier to your email whenever signing up for debate related websites like Tabroom or adding your email to email chains. An email address, such as thisistotallyarealemail+tourneyemails@gmail.com, can have a modifier like “+tourneyemails” to add more data to the email address (all while not causing it to go to the wrong inbox). Email servers process your email normally despite the “+tourneyemails,” given that is a modifier to the base email of thisistotallyarealemail@gmail.com. Email servers know the email is supposed to go to thisistotallyarealemail@gmail.com and recognize that this is a variation of that email, and this variation has extra information in the modifier to help ensure you can more easily recognize what version of that email address you used

Then, add the new email like “thisistotallyarealemail+tourneyemails@gmail.com” to a “to” filter in order to label all the emails to that email address with a debate label. Despite heading to the same inbox, for filter purposes Gmail treats the emails thisistotallyarealemail@gmail.com and thisistotallyarealemail+tourneyemails@gmail.com differently, meaning that all your regular email to thisistotallyarealemail@gmail.com won’t be labeled with the debate label.

Debate Label Subcategories: Additionally, subcategorize your debate emails with extra labels as needed. If you do multiple debate events, add labels specific to that specific debate event so you don’t need to sort through LD emails to find your Policy emails (or vice versa). If you’re in Policy debate, I would recommend adding labels for each specific tournament to more easily review old email chains for speech redos or block creation. LD debaters should ideally sort emails by topic. Unlike Policy, older topic email chains are less useful for the purpose of speech redos and there’s usually ~2-3 tournaments you’ll attend per topic (meaning there is less harm with grouping).

Tabroom Label: Almost all debaters will receive emails from Tabroom. Make a Tabroom label as well as a “from” filter for main Tabroom emails (info@www.tabroom.com, help@tabroom.com, and/or live@www.tabroom.com) in order to better see new round postings or tournament announcements. A supplement to this is to add a “from” filter for any tournament specific Tabroom email, and add the Tabroom label and/or the tournament specific label.

Notes-to-Self Label: If you’re taking the advice from the earlier section about sending scheduled emails to yourself to remind yourself of future obligations and deadlines, make a new label called “notes-to-self”. Often these notes don’t need to be saved long-term and should be deleted more readily than emails with potential future reference material (such as old email chains), so a label categorizing all the emails you can delete later is worthwhile. You also want a label to clearly differentiate emails you send to you and emails other people send to you to avoid potential confusion

Kankee Briefs Label: This is shameless self-advertising, but we admit it that fact, so everything should be great. Hypothetically, if you love Kankee Briefs so much that you have signed up for our email list (linked here), you can set add a Kankee Briefs label/filter. Add a “from” filter to star every email from karkingkankee.marketing@gmail.com in order to always ensure your free briefs from us are always clearly indicated. This can also be used to  prevent our emails from being added to spam, which I would look into if you don’t always receive our emails. 

One other piece of advice is for the end of a debate season or a school year. I recolor all of the old classes, tournaments, and/or topic labels to grey. It becomes a lot easier to see which emails are outdated and from previous debate seasons/school semesters compared to the emails relevant for the here-and-now when they are color coded. Personally, I have a list of old classes shown in grey for my college email and a list of old jobs for my personal email which are also shown in grey.

After recoloring your email labels, hide those unused labels from your label bar (as they are no longer immediately relevant compared to new classes, tournaments, and topics. This can be done by going to the labels section in the bottom left and selecting the “more” button, and then select “hide”. Alternatively, you can also reclassify your old labels from being a main label, and turn it into a nested label within another higher-level label like old classes or old tournaments. This is analogous to putting these labels in an archive folder to reference later. However, generally speaking, hiding unused labels is easier.

Email Chain Tips

A final piece of advice oriented towards debate events with strong disclosure norms is to create an intra-team email scouting email. Carbon-copied this email on all email chains for your team to have an archive of all speech documents broken on the circuit or at that tournament. Think of this email as a more personalized version of the OpenCaselist Wiki, where your school is keeping track of what aff and neg arguments each team has previously ran. Inter-debater cooperation over scouting at a tournament is vital at higher-levels to learn the potential rival team’s strategies. This phenomenon is so powerful that it is routinely cited in theory debates about small schools as an example of how larger institutions often beat smaller schools (even if they have weaker teams). The larger schools have an asymmetric ability to be more knowledgeable about rival teams’ arguments compared to smaller schools, as small schools comparably have less debaters participating who can inform other team-members of rivals’ arguments. If you cooperate as a team for scouting, the knowledge of arguments broken becomes a force multiplier for all debaters on your team in that event, as everyone can better predict and prep out potential future debates.

I would advise asking for permission to include this email from rival teams when creating email chains. However, do realize that there is little functional difference between them being included on the email chain and them opting-out, as in an opt-out situation, your team’s debaters can email the documents separately to the team email after downloading them. However, there may be a bigger fairness concern if this is an inter-team email, such as one involving schools A, B, and C, as school D is left out of the information sharing agreement and is at an unfair disadvantage. To my knowledge, there is no hard rule banning inter-team cooperation between schools A, B, and C, but this could hypothetically warrant a theory argument.

Additionally, make an email template with a template for the tournament name and round number in the subject line, the intra-team email carbon copied, and the 1AC as a file attachment. Particularly for policy, in which you will send out this 1AC thrice per tournament at a minimum, minimizing the repeated effort for this work means more pre-round prep time to better answer that particular team’s negative strategy. Even if the amount of time saved is low, it is less for you to worry about and makes it easier to search through email chains after a tournament.