I often participate in open-source mailing lists such as python-ideas. These mailing lists are usually run by a software called Mailman, which unfortunately doesn't have a feature that is really important to me: I want to only get mails for threads I participate in. Just because I'm participating in a discussion in a mailing list, doesn't mean I want to get updates for every single post that someone makes. I only want to get updates on threads that I participated in.
Now, Google Groups has this basic feature, but Mailman doesn't. And people on python-ideas don't like it when I post through Google Groups because it makes messages look weird or something. So they're asking me to use Gmail. They suggested using Gmail filters to avoid getting all the mailing list messages in my inbox.
So I tried this filter:
Matches: [Python-ideas] -{my.email@gmail.com}
Do this: Skip Inbox
But it didn't work, because some messages that are in my thread but after a message I sent appear to not include my email address.
What can I do to filter out all messages that are in threads I didn't participate in?
Best Answer
I don't think you're going to be able to do this with a filter, since there's no identifiable characteristic on the message to let you know if it's for a thread you're participating in or not.
You should be able to do what you want with a simple search, though.
Since all the messages you send (including, obviously, any replies you make to a thread) will get the
sentpseudo-label. So, a search like:should bring back all of the conversations with "[python-ideas]" somewhere in the subject that you've replied to. Anything that's unread will be conversations with new messages. You could even filter that further:
This also generates a unique URL that you can bookmark or otherwise store for future use.