Survive Black Friday Emails: The Filters to Set Up This Week

Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday 27 November, with Cyber Monday on the 30th. If your inbox already feels like a shopping centre car park, you’re not imagining it: the sales emails started days ago, and the heaviest fortnight of the year is still ahead.

You can’t stop retailers sending, but you can decide where their mail lands. This half-hour setup moves the deals out of the way and keeps anything about money you’ve already spent in plain view. December’s clean-up is at the end.

Why late November is so bad for your inbox

The email platforms publish their own numbers each year. They’re vendor figures, each covering only that company’s customers, and every vendor likes email to look enormous. The direction is still clear.

Klaviyo says it delivered more than 22.7 billion messages across its channels over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday 2025, up 25% on the year before. Salesforce’s marketing platform sent 56.3 billion marketing messages during Cyber Week, 25 November to 1 December. Sinch, which owns Mailgun and Mailjet, saw November 2025 email volume up 32% year on year, “with the most significant growth happening the week before Cyber Week as early-bird deals dropped”.

That early build-up is deliberate. Klaviyo’s training tells brands to start “gradually increasing your sending volume each day” in the weeks before Black Friday, growing each campaign’s audience by 50% at a time, so inbox providers are used to the traffic by the big day. The events keep stretching too: in 2025 Walmart’s first “Black Friday Deals” event ran from 14 November, and Amazon UK’s Black Friday Week lasted twelve days from 20 November. Klaviyo’s report credits “early access” for repeat-customer spending, which translates as more emails, sooner, to anyone who has bought before.

The awkward part is that the email you need arrives in the same flood: order confirmations, dispatch notices, delivery slots, return labels. So do the fakes. The job is sorting, not blocking.

The setup, in one sitting

Do these in order. Steps are for Gmail and Outlook; iCloud, Fastmail and most other providers have equivalent rules.

1. Send the deals to a “Deals 2026” label

Gmail. Paste this into the search box, click the sliders icon (Show search options), then Create filter:

category:promotions -category:purchases -subject:(order OR shipped OR dispatched OR delivered OR delivery OR receipt OR refund OR return OR returns)

Tick Skip the Inbox (Archive it) and Apply the label, choose New label and call it “Deals 2026”. Leave “Also apply filter to matching conversations” unticked, so the label only collects this season’s mail and is safe to empty later.

category:promotions is Gmail’s own Promotions classifier, one of its documented search operators, and it does most of the work. The minus terms are for step 2. Google says category: works “if you use inbox categories”, so if you’ve turned the tabs off and the search comes back empty, swap in the plain word unsubscribe, which also catches the newsletters you read. (list: needs a specific list address, so it suits single senders.) Our Gmail filters to copy post has more recipes.

Outlook. Create a folder called “Deals 2026”. In new Outlook or Outlook on the web, go to Settings > Mail > Rules > Add new rule. Set the condition to Message header includes, enter List-Unsubscribe, and set the action to Move to that folder. Outlook has no Promotions category, but nearly every retail campaign carries that header, because Gmail and Yahoo have required one-click unsubscribe from bulk senders since 2024. Newsletters carry it too, so give any you read their own rule above this one. Our Outlook organising guide covers classic Outlook, and why new Outlook can’t run rules on Gmail or iCloud accounts added to it.

2. Keep orders, deliveries and returns in the inbox

Anything about money you’ve already spent should stay where you’ll see it.

Gmail runs every filter that matches a message, with no priority order, so the exceptions have to live inside the deals filter itself. That’s the job of those minus terms: -category:purchases leaves out anything Gmail already recognises as a purchase, and the subject list catches what it misses. Then add a second filter so orders are easy to find when a return deadline comes round:

category:purchases OR subject:(order OR shipped OR dispatched OR delivered OR delivery OR receipt OR refund OR return OR returns)

Give it Apply the label “Orders 2026” and Categorize as: Primary. Do not tick Never send it to Spam. Fake delivery emails use exactly these words, and you want Gmail’s spam filter still doing its job.

Outlook processes rules in order, which makes this tidier. Add a rule called “Orders” with the condition Subject includes, typing each word (order, shipped, dispatched, delivered, delivery, receipt, refund, return) and pressing Enter after each; any one of them triggers the rule. Set the action to Categorize with a colour category called Orders, tick Stop processing more rules, and use the arrows in the rules list to move it above the Deals rule.

The trade-off on both: some promotions will slip through (“Order by 18 December for Christmas delivery”). Let them. A stray deal in the inbox costs you a second. A delivery update archived among 400 discount codes can cost you a parcel.

3. Let two or three brands through

There are probably a few shops whose sale you do want. Keep the list short, or you’ve rebuilt the problem. Copy each sender’s domain from an email they’ve actually sent you, since many retailers mail from a subdomain or a separate marketing domain. In Gmail, edit the deals filter (Settings > See all settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses) and add -from:(shopone.com OR shoptwo.co.uk) to the end, then create a filter on the same from: terms that stars them and categorises them as Primary. In Outlook, add a rule on Sender address includes with each domain, pick Pin to top or a category, tick Stop processing more rules, and move it above the Deals rule.

4. Shop under a separate address

Mail to its own address can be filtered on the address rather than guessed from content, and some providers let you switch the address off entirely.

• Gmail: add a plus sign and any word before the @, as in you+shop@gmail.com. Google confirms it arrives in your normal inbox, and a filter on to:you+shop@gmail.com can label it.
• Outlook.com and Microsoft 365 accept plus addresses too. On work accounts it’s on by default unless an admin has turned it off, and a Recipient address includes rule will file it.
• Fastmail delivers plus-addressed mail straight into a folder whose name matches the tag, no rule needed, and its Masked Email addresses can be blocked or deleted later.
• iCloud+ subscribers can use Hide My Email to generate random forwarding addresses and deactivate them when they’re done.

Two caveats. Some checkout forms still reject the + sign. And a plus address is only a label: anyone can delete the tag and reach your real address. For a shop you’re unsure of, a masked address you can switch off is the stronger choice.

5. Assume every “delivery problem” email is fake

Genuine delivery emails are exactly what scammers copy. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre reported £11.8 million lost to online shopping fraud over the 2024 festive season (1 November 2024 to 31 January 2025), citing City of London Police figures, and tells shoppers to “stop and think” about any message about a delivery. In the US, fake package delivery messages were the FTC’s most reported text scam of 2024, and the same lure turns up by email: a missed delivery, an address you need to update, a small redelivery fee, a parcel heading back to the sender unless you click. “Problem with your order” emails are the same trick in a different costume.

Your Orders filter will happily put a fake straight into your inbox, because it matches the same words. So never act on the link. Open the retailer’s site or the carrier’s app yourself and look the order up. If it’s real, it’ll be there. Our guide to spotting phishing emails covers the tells in detail. In the UK, forward suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk; in the US, the FTC asks you to forward them to reportphishing@apwg.org.

The December clean-up

In the first week of December, open Deals 2026 and look at who’s in it. Plenty will be shops you gave your address to at checkout and never meant to hear from again. Unsubscribe from those, and report anything you don’t recognise as spam rather than clicking its links. Our mass unsubscribe guide covers doing this safely in one go, and Gmail’s Manage subscriptions view in the left-hand menu ranks regular senders by volume.

Then leave the label alone until returns have closed. A 30-day window on a Black Friday order ends around New Year, and some retailers extend holiday returns into January, so put a date at the end of January in your calendar. When it comes, select everything in the label or folder and delete it, then delete the Gmail filter or switch off the Outlook rule so it doesn’t quietly archive promotions all year. Keep Orders 2026, though: those are your receipts if something breaks under warranty.

A deals column you glance at once a day

If you use Kanmail, a Gmail label or Outlook folder is just another column on the board, so Deals 2026 sits beside your inbox instead of hiding in a sidebar. Glance at it once a day, drag the one thing worth buying into a To Do column, and ignore the rest. Sender colour-coding makes your allowlisted shops stand out. In December, list mail from senders that support it gets an unsubscribe button in the message view, handled inside the app with no web page to visit. It works with Gmail and Outlook, and our kanban for email guide explains the board idea properly.

The bottom line

You won’t out-send the retail industry, and you don’t need to. A deals filter with an orders exception turns the next fortnight into a label you open when you feel like shopping, and the January purge means next November starts from a smaller list.