Gmail – Applying Filters to ONLY New Message Body

gmailgmail-filters

I use filtering to tag email tasks as "In Progress" or "Done" etc. by parsing the body of the message. Sometimes I remove tags manually because the task is, after-all, not done, and needs further work to be done on it. The problem is: if I get any reply after that, say for a question that needs answering for the task to be complete, then it RE-TAGs the thread because of the old message body.

I would like the filtering to work on only the new content in the body of a message and ignore the old. I know that gmail creates a new body with old content, but perhaps you know what I mean. Is there a way?

Best Answer

As far as I know, Gmail doesn't support such a feature. It will always scan the entire message body.

If I understand the problem correctly, this is only an issue when you remove an "In Progress" or "Done" tag.

One workaround:

When you remove those tags, add a new tag (ex: "No-Filter").
Update the "In Progress" and "Done" filters so that it will never add something with the "No-Filter" tag to those labels.

Related Solutions

Create Gmail Filter if Message Body Contains Your Name

Remember that you can use any Gmail search operator in a filter via the Has the words: textbox since Gmail just AND's together the operators that are filled in via the filter dialog.

I'll suggest you start by trying this:

Create a filter that finds new emails with your name in them and applies a temporary label. The search operation you would use in the filter is:
```
is:unread AND body:"Your Name"
```
Create a filter that finds read emails in the temporary label and removes the label.
```
label:templabel AND is:read
```
Unfortunately, while filters can operate on read emails, they cannot currently remove labels, we are at a stopping point.

Sorry can't help more, but until Gmail filters can remove a label, you will not be able to accomplish this via filters.

Potential workarounds would be:

Setup an IMAP client with the equivalent filtering where instead of adding/removing a temporary label you would be copying/deleting the email from the temporary folder.
Google recently introduced a new scripting framework for Google Apps.
One really crude hack for step 2 would be to have the filter forward the email as well as delete it. You would forward to your own email address with a plus extension, e.g. username+templabelname@gmail.com.

Then a new step 3 would be to catch those emails using the deliveredto:username+templabel@gmail.com search string, and reapply some label.

Not sure how cleanly this method would work, especially because you would get header cruft from the forward (vs. redirecting).

Personally, I would look at #2 since learning scripting for Google Apps would pay off in the long run.