Many email filtering systems are designed to siphon each email into a single destination folder. Usually you have a list of rules which get applied in order, and as soon as one matches an email the matching process ends.<\/p>\n
Gmail’s filtering system is different; it’s designed to add any number of labels to each email, and the rules don’t get applied in any particular order. Sometimes it’s really useful to be able to apply multiple labels to an email, but if you just want to apply one in a fashion that emulates folders, it can be tricky.<\/p>\n
So here’s a non-trivial example of how I filter bugmail into two “folders”. The first “folder” contains high-priority bugmail.<\/p>\n
For the high priority bugmail, on Gmail\u2019s \u201cCreate a Filter\u201d screen, in the \u201cFrom:\u201d field I put:<\/p>\n
bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and in the \u201cHas the words:\u201d field I put:<\/p>\n
“you are the assignee” OR “you reported” OR “you are on the CC list” OR subject:”granted:” OR subject:”requested:” OR subject:”canceled:” OR subject:”Secure bug” OR “Product\/Component: Core :: DMD” OR “Product\/Component: Toolkit :: about:memory” OR “Your Outstanding Requests”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For the low priority bugmail, on Gmail\u2019s \u201cCreate a Filter\u201d screen, in the \u201cFrom:\u201d field put:<\/p>\n
bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and in the \u201cDoesn\u2019t have:\u201d field put:<\/p>\n
(“you are the assignee” OR “you reported” OR “you are on the CC list” OR subject:”granted:” OR subject:”requested:” OR subject:”canceled:” OR subject:”Secure bug” OR “Product\/Component: Core :: DMD” OR “Product\/Component: Toolkit :: about:memory” OR “Your Outstanding Requests”)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(I’m not certain if the parentheses are needed here. It’s otherwise identical to the contents in the previous case.)<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve modified them a few times and they work very well for me. Everyone else will have different needs, but this might be a useful starting point.<\/p>\n
This is just one way to do it. See here<\/a> for an alternative way. (Update: Byron Jones pointed out that my approach assumes that the wording used in email bodies won’t change, and so the alternative is more robust.)<\/p>\n