GMail has a somewhat powerful filtering mechanism that you can
apply to incoming email. Unfortunately, I say somewhat since there
really isn’t an easy way to select student email and take it out of your
inbox. It won’t match on part of an address, so you can’t just search
for an email address that starts with a number.
What I’ve done is configure Google Apps for Education to append a footer
for all email from students with the tag:
#studentofkcs. That also means that if you are now a Google Apps for
Education user or cannot automatically add this tag to the footer of
your student email messages you will have to have the students do it
themselves. Most email packages allow the user to add a signature to
their email messages, they just need to be sure to add a piece of text
that will be unique.
To filter email from students, go to GMail and in the search field at
the top of the screen enter #studentofkcs and hit the triangle to the
left of the blue button with the magnifying class.
Then click Create filter with this search. It will have a list of
things that can happen to the message when it matches the search. You
will want to check Skip the inbox (Archive it), and Apply the
label:.
Since you probably don’t already have a label (or folder, if you want to
call it that) set up, you can click on the Choose label… and
create a new label.
I like to put an exclamation point in front of the label so when the
list of labels are sorted alphabetically, the ones I’ve created are at
the top.
Click Create and then Create Filter. From now on, email from
students will bypass your inbox and be in the your label created above.