Gmail – How to Exclude Chat When Applying Label via Filter

Filters are processed in the order they exist in the list. This means that if a filter comes after another one, you can use one of these special filter criterias which it warns you about. For example, if you have a filter that stars a message, then you can have a rule below it use is:starred successfully.

Some criteria is even applied automatically before filters are processed. Examples are messages that are sent to spam (i.e. you can use is:spam), or a POP3 account which labels incoming mail. In this case the filter's order does not matter.

Here is a list of criteria you can use:

• is:starred: if a previous filter has starred the message, this can be used.
• is:spam: if the message was automatically marked as spam, this criteria can be used.
• is:read: if the message's read property was not modified (i.e. it stays unread), this will not match it. If a previous filter marked a message as read, this will match it.
• is:unread: the opposite of is:read.
• label:example: if a previous filter has labeled a message this can be used. (Note that mailboxes such as the inbox will work. That is, label:inbox will work.)
• label:user@example.com: if your mail account is set to read another account via POP3 and is set it to automatically label all email from that account, the label: criteria can be used since it will first label the message and only then run the filter.
• in:trash: you would think that if a message is trashed from an earlier filter, the other filters would stop working, however, that is not the case.
• in:inbox: the two things that affect this are "Skip the inbox" and "Delete it".
• in:anywhere: it's pointless, but it works.

Criteria you cannot use:

• in:sent: When you send a message, it will first process the filters and only then be considered sent, thus, you cannot use the in:sent criteria in a filter.

Untested (I will update this as I test these):

• is:muted
• is:chat
• is:important

You can set up a filter so that no message is sent to the spam folder:

1. Settings → Filters → Create a new filter
2. From: *
3. Create filter with this search
4. check Never send it to Spam

From there, you can set up your email forwarding.