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Monday 27 July 2015

Android Watch Notifications

The benefit of an Android watch is to not constantly be checking phone for updates on various matters.

However, you also don't want the watch to notify you of any last little thing that happens.

With apps, these can be set to block notifications. This applies to both phone AND watch:


With "sensitive" notifications, the content of the message will not be displayed on, for example, the phone's lock screen.

However, for email, I want to see notifications, but not *everything* (e.g. mailing lists are not a priority). The way to achieve this is via the Gmail Settings. From there, select "Manage labels", which produces a list of all the labels set up on the Gmail account. Individual labels can be set to Sync, and there is a further setting for Label notifications:


However, there is still the question of how to ensure that I only get notifications for the emails which interest me.

The way I have done this is by using a not-so-well-known aspect of Gmail, which is the addition of full stops in email addresses. Gmail will treat anybody@gmail.com, a.nybody@gmail.com and any.body@gmail.com as the same address.

So the trick is to keep my address *without* full stops as my "real" address and then for any mailing list subscriptions (or indeed email used on any website / forums which are not important) use a variant with full stop included.

I then set up a filter in Gmail:

Matches: to:(xxxxx@gmail.com and -to:x.xxxx@gmail.com) -in:chats
Do this: Apply label "Me" 

This new label, "Me", is then set as the only one which sends me notifications in Gmail.

*** UPDATE ***

It would appear some of the Gmail settings in Android have changed, so below are screenshots of the necessary set up for "wanted" notifications only.

For Inbox:

For "Me":