Like most Mozilla developers, I get a lot of bugmail. Maybe 10% of that is important, e.g. bugs I filed, bugs I have to review patches for, etc. The other 90% of that is stuff I have a passing interest in.
I have a couple of Gmail filters that I use to separate these two streams of email. They’re non-obvious, so I promised Paul Biggar that I would blog about these so that he and others could do the same thing.
To catch interesting bugmail, on Gmail’s “Create a Filter” screen, in the “From:” field put:
bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org
and in the “Has the words:” field put:
"review?(nnethercote" OR "you are the assignee" OR "you reported" OR "you are on the CC list" OR subject:"review granted" OR subject:"review requested" OR subject:"review canceled" OR subject:"feedback requested" OR subject:"feedback granted" OR subject:"feedback canceled"
To catch less interesting bugmail, on Gmail’s “Create a Filter” screen, in the “From:” field put:
bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org
and in the “Doesn’t have:” field put:
("you are the assignee" OR "you reported" OR "you are on the CC list" OR subject:"review granted" OR subject:"review requested" OR subject:"review canceled" OR subject:"feedback requested" OR subject:"feedback granted" OR subject:"feedback canceled")
I’ve modified them a few times and they work very well for me. It’s possible there are some cases that they miscategorize but I haven’t seen that happen for a long time.
Update: In the first “Has the words:” field, you’ll obviously need to change nnethercote to something else.
4 replies on “Using Gmail filters to identify important Bugzilla mail”
Why don’t you use the bugzilla keywords in the mail header ?
Ludovic: that’s what I initially tried to to, but as far as I could determine Gmail filters don’t let you filter on the contents of the mail header (other than “from” and “subject”).
I wonder if the Gmail priority inbox would be able to learn about this with some training. It seems like it would be a fairly good fit, since it’s phrase-oriented and such.
Of course, filters mean no training required other than editing the filter itself.
Package up and export your useful gmail filters:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-filter-importexport.html
It is simpler to construct OR phrases like so:
{“you are the assignee” “you reported”} OR subject:{“review granted” “review requested”}
etc.