Filter assistance

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Rich

unread,
Oct 14, 2009, 11:38:40 PM10/14/09
to Gmail-Users
Greetings,

I'm having a bear of a time trying to figure out how to "fix" a filter
I currently have. Everything's been kosher; I'm using a filter to
label all emails from @thiscompany.com and archive them. There are
various mailing lists offered by that company and I'm subscribed to a
few of them. I use the filter to label messages sent from employees
of that company as they're the most important amongst the volumes of
noise.

Recently, someone decided to also subscribe using an account named
list.thisc...@whateverhisdomainis.com. What I need is for the
filter to use everything after the @, which I thought it was doing,
but it seems to be picking up any matches in the entire e-mail
address, including everything before the domain. He broke my
filter...:(.

I'm not the best when it comes to using filters to their fullest
extent, so I tried searching for an answer and I've come up with
nothing to help. I've tried a bunch of different options, including
ditching the From: field and using from: in the Has Words field, and
various other operators and whatsawhozits...but still no dice.

I'd really appreciate an opportunity to learn a thing or two about
filters in this regard, so if anybody has a minute, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your time.

Andy

unread,
Oct 15, 2009, 9:30:50 AM10/15/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
Two suggestions, which MIGHT help (I haven't tested them):

If you aren't already, include the '@' within the search string, as
in, "@thiscompany.com". Unfortunately, Gmail seems to ignore
many/most non-alphanumeric characters (grumble!), so it might not
work.

Alternatively, in the From: field, add something like

-"whateverhisdomainis.com"

The minus sign is supposed to tell Gmail to exclude that string from
being a match (functionally equivalent to a NOT).

Andy

Rich

unread,
Oct 15, 2009, 1:07:01 PM10/15/09
to Gmail-Users
Thanks for the response.

I am, in fact, already using the @ in my search string. No good
there.

As far as the - goes, I know this would be the solution for right now,
but what happens the next time someone else does the same thing? I
guess I should have been more specific in that the solution I'm
looking for is one that would make the filter "maintenance-free".

For now, I'll resign to using - to exclude this particular person's
address, but if a more ideal solution comes to mind, please share.
Thanks for the suggestion.

Zack (Doc)

unread,
Oct 15, 2009, 4:09:26 PM10/15/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
Ok... I'm a little confused on your request, but I'm trying to help.

You mention getting various mailing lists from that company, but you mention your filter is to label messages sent from employees of that company.  Did you filter not catch actual postings to the mailing lists?  Do the mailing lists get sent "to:thiscompany.com"?

If so, then you should be able to move your "from" filter into Has Words, and add "-to:thiscompany.com"... Then it would catch things sent from them, but not to them, which your friendly "breaker" would fail to match.

Some would even argue that this syntax:
(from: -to:)thiscompany.com
would work, but I've had very little success putting the modifiers in parenthesis myself.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 23:38, Rich <richa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Greetings,

I'm having a bear of a time trying to figure out how to "fix" a filter
I currently have.  Everything's been kosher;  I'm using a filter to
label all emails from @thiscompany.com and archive them.  There are
various mailing lists offered by that company and I'm subscribed to a
few of them.  I use the filter to label messages sent from employees
of that company as they're the most important amongst the volumes of
noise.

Recently, someone decided to also subscribe using an account named

filter to use everything after the @, which I thought it was doing,
but it seems to be picking up any matches in the entire e-mail
address, including everything before the domain.  He broke my
filter...:(.

I'm not the best when it comes to using filters to their fullest
extent, so I tried searching for an answer and I've come up with
nothing to help.  I've tried a bunch of different options, including
ditching the From: field and using from: in the Has Words field, and
various other operators and whatsawhozits...but still no dice.

I'd really appreciate an opportunity to learn a thing or two about
filters in this regard, so if anybody has a minute, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your time.





--

Bill Watterson  - "People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children."

Rich

unread,
Oct 15, 2009, 11:44:26 PM10/15/09
to Gmail-Users
From what little I'd understood about the -to: operator, I was pretty
hopeful that it would do the trick, but sadly it didn't. I also have
private e-mail conversations with various employees of the company, so
basically what using "from:@thiscompany.com -to:@thiscompany.com" did
was filter out the messages they'd sent to the mailing list and only
showed me the private conversations I've had with them...which is
actually a nice little filter that I didn't previously have! I was
just grouping any e-mail from them in one bunch. I search for most
everything anyway, but it's nice to have that as a link now, so thanks
for that.

I don't think I expressed myself clearly originally. I did my best,
but let me try again.

The company has five or six mailing lists, all of which I believe I'm
subscribed to. I've set up filters for each mailing list so that
they're labeled accordingly. To send an e-mail to the list, one would
send "to:list.thisc...@thiscompany.com". Most of the
discussions are between community members about various aspects of
programming and administration related to the use of this company's
products. Being who they are and what they're known for, the
employees of the company chime in to offer help when they can. Amidst
the e-mail traffic generated by the community, the messages sent from
these employees are usually lost in the shuffle. To compound that
problem, when they do offer their words of wisdom, it's always
something significant that I want to know about and not possibly just
skim over, as I have a habit of doing. So I set up a filter a while
back so that anything sent from an @thiscompany.com address would get
labeled so I'd see my (1) next to the label and know to check out what
was being said. I used "@thiscompany.com", without the quotes, in the
From: field. These were better times.

Then comes along this new subscriber who uses
list.thisc...@hisdoman.com as his e-mail address. Now whenever
he sends a message to the list, the filter picks up the
"thiscompany.com" part of his e-mail address as being from them and
lets me know that he's posted. I had assumed, incorrectly as it turns
out, that the filter would only look at the @ and whatever proceeds
it, but what it appears is that it's somewhat ignoring the placement
of the @ and as long as "thiscompany.com" exists anywhere in the e-
mail address, Gmail will apply the filter.

Yes, using "Has the Words: from:@thiscompany.com -from:@hisdomain.com"
takes care of the problem, but only until another person joins who
uses the same practice. My ideal filter would be future-proof against
these people and not make me have to visit Settings>Filters each time
one pops up.

I hope this helps to make my issue more clear and that I've answered
your questions, but if you need anything else, please just ask and
I'll try to provide more info. I also hope that being obscure about
the actual e-mail addresses isn't a hindrance, but I don't feel right
about sharing that info in such a public forum.

On Oct 15, 4:09 pm, "Zack (Doc)" <z...@tnan.net> wrote:
> Ok... I'm a little confused on your request, but I'm trying to help.
> You mention getting various mailing lists from that company, but you mention
> your filter is to label messages sent from employees of that company.  Did
> you filter not catch actual postings to the mailing lists?  Do the mailing
> lists get sent "to:thiscompany.com"?
>
> If so, then you should be able to move your "from" filter into Has Words,
> and add "-to:thiscompany.com"... Then it would catch things sent from them,
> but not to them, which your friendly "breaker" would fail to match.
>
> Some would even argue that this syntax:
> (from: -to:)thiscompany.com
> would work, but I've had very little success putting the modifiers in
> parenthesis myself.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 23:38, Rich <richard....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Greetings,
>
> > I'm having a bear of a time trying to figure out how to "fix" a filter
> > I currently have.  Everything's been kosher;  I'm using a filter to
> > label all emails from @thiscompany.com and archive them.  There are
> > various mailing lists offered by that company and I'm subscribed to a
> > few of them.  I use the filter to label messages sent from employees
> > of that company as they're the most important amongst the volumes of
> > noise.
>
> > Recently, someone decided to also subscribe using an account named
> > list.thiscompany....@whateverhisdomainis.com.  What I need is for the
> > filter to use everything after the @, which I thought it was doing,
> > but it seems to be picking up any matches in the entire e-mail
> > address, including everything before the domain.  He broke my
> > filter...:(.
>
> > I'm not the best when it comes to using filters to their fullest
> > extent, so I tried searching for an answer and I've come up with
> > nothing to help.  I've tried a bunch of different options, including
> > ditching the From: field and using from: in the Has Words field, and
> > various other operators and whatsawhozits...but still no dice.
>
> > I'd really appreciate an opportunity to learn a thing or two about
> > filters in this regard, so if anybody has a minute, I'm all ears.
>
> > Thanks for your time.
>
> --
>
> Bill Watterson <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23512.html>  - "People

Zack (Doc)

unread,
Oct 16, 2009, 12:46:22 AM10/16/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
Don't blame yourself for not being completely clear.  You simply referenced them sending out list mails, without specifics of how they do it, which greatly affects how you can filter for them.  Your description helps a lot (I think, provided I got it right this time), and there's no problem being generic about it.

So... to see if I caught up.  They have a number of lists, which arrive in your box and you catch them with "to:list.thiscompany.com@thiscompany.com"; and you already had a filter to catch all the mailing list posts with no problem.

You decided you wanted an additional marker when one of these posts was actually from a person in thiscompany, so you made another filter to call attention to their posts.

If I've got it right so far, I'm concerned there may be little else you can do, since, as you've found, "@" isn't something GMail will search for, so it matches him (list.thiscompany.com@hisdomain.com) along with the employees (@thiscompany.com).  One option you could *TRY* would be to search for a header entry that's not normally displayed, but if you can search, it might be the trick.

Try a search on "sender:thiscompany.com" and see if you get any results.  If you do, my guess would be that this includes all the ones from the list, as well as the ones from the employees.  If that works then your future-proof filter for employee e-mails would be "from:thiscompany.com sender:thiscompany.com".

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 23:44, Rich <richa...@gmail.com> wrote:

From what little I'd understood about the -to: operator, I was pretty
hopeful that it would do the trick, but sadly it didn't.  I also have
private e-mail conversations with various employees of the company, so
basically what using "from:@thiscompany.com -to:@thiscompany.com" did
was filter out the messages they'd sent to the mailing list and only
showed me the private conversations I've had with them...which is
actually a nice little filter that I didn't previously have!  I was
just grouping any e-mail from them in one bunch.  I search for most
everything anyway, but it's nice to have that as a link now, so thanks
for that.

I don't think I expressed myself clearly originally.  I did my best,
but let me try again.

The company has five or six mailing lists, all of which I believe I'm
subscribed to.  I've set up filters for each mailing list so that
they're labeled accordingly.  To send an e-mail to the list, one would
send "to:list.thiscompany.com@thiscompany.com". Most of the

discussions are between community members about various aspects of
programming and administration related to the use of this company's
products.  Being who they are and what they're known for, the
employees of the company chime in to offer help when they can.  Amidst
the e-mail traffic generated by the community, the messages sent from
these employees are usually lost in the shuffle.  To compound that
problem, when they do offer their words of wisdom, it's always
something significant that I want to know about and not possibly just
skim over, as I have a habit of doing.  So I set up a filter a while
back so that anything sent from an @thiscompany.com address would get
labeled so I'd see my (1) next to the label and know to check out what
was being said.  I used "@thiscompany.com", without the quotes, in the
From: field.  These were better times.

Then comes along this new subscriber who uses
list.thiscompany.com@hisdoman.com as his e-mail address.  Now whenever



--

George Bernard Shaw  - "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."

Rich

unread,
Oct 16, 2009, 3:02:51 AM10/16/09
to Gmail-Users
I feel like you're pickin' up what I'm layin' down now.

I'm afraid that I still haven't given all the details, though. Upon
further inspection(read:me actually reading instead of just clicking),
I've found that messages coming from the lists are filtered with list:
and not from:. That gave me an idea...

First, I tried just "from:(@thiscompany.com) -list:". What I figured
would come out is what came out. I got only messages sent to me by
the employees directly and not correspondence from any of the lists.
So then I just did a copy/pasta of the list addresses and ended up
with "from:(@thiscompany.com) -list:list1.thiscompany.com -
list:list2.thiscompany.com -list:list3.thiscompany.com -
list:list4.thiscompany.com -list:list5.thiscompany.com -
list:list6.thiscompany.com" which produced just about the same
results, again as expected, save for some other random filtering I
do. So I'm just testing the waters now to see if what I expect is
what the actual output is. In those two cases, it's been by the
books.

But I'm disappointed that "from:@thiscompany.com" doesn't actually
mean that in Gmail. I've tried the other suggestions you've made, but
still they don't give me only the output I'm craving. sender:
produced no results, but I might play around with it some more. I
found another article detailing:

Operator: listid

Sample usage:
listid:djangousers.googlegroups.com

Why its useful: This filter is more reliable than the "list:" filter
that gmail has documented as it provides discrete identification for
lists that utilize this header.

I tried it, it didn't satisfy. Maybe I'm using it wrong. Any
suggestions for that? Because the employees send to the list and I
get those messages from the mailman there, any operator combination
I've tried only gives me one of two things. 1) The direct
communication e-mails I have with employees or 2) All of 1), plus
everything they send to the list, plus that guy. So it actually seems
that Gmail is obeying the @, and that just that guy's practice of
using the list name as his e-mail name is breaking the filter. I
still think that there's a good, solid solution for this, but it's
currently escaping me.

I'm gonna move this parenthesis here and that one over there then
change an operator or two and add this one or that one. You get the
idea. I'll report any progress I make and will definitely still take
any suggestions that cross anyone's mind.

Sigh...maybe I just rambled on and re-confuzzled the situation.
Groups needs Goggles.

On Oct 16, 12:46 am, "Zack (Doc)" <z...@tnan.net> wrote:
> Don't blame yourself for not being completely clear.  You simply referenced
> them sending out list mails, without specifics of how they do it, which
> greatly affects how you can filter for them.  Your description helps a lot
> (I think, provided I got it right this time), and there's no problem being
> generic about it.
> So... to see if I caught up.  They have a number of lists, which arrive in
> your box and you catch them with "to:list.thiscompany....@thiscompany.com";
> and you already had a filter to catch all the mailing list posts with no
> problem.
>
> You decided you wanted an additional marker when one of these posts was
> actually from a person in thiscompany, so you made another filter to call
> attention to their posts.
>
> If I've got it right so far, I'm concerned there may be little else you can
> do, since, as you've found, "@" isn't something GMail will search for, so it
> matches him (list.thiscompany....@hisdomain.com) along with the employees (@
> thiscompany.com).  One option you could *TRY* would be to search for a
> header entry that's not normally displayed, but if you can search, it might
> be the trick.
>
> Try a search on "sender:thiscompany.com" and see if you get any results.  If
> you do, my guess would be that this includes all the ones from the list, as
> well as the ones from the employees.  If that works then your future-proof
> filter for employee e-mails would be "from:thiscompany.com sender:
> thiscompany.com".
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 23:44, Rich <richard....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From what little I'd understood about the -to: operator, I was pretty
> > hopeful that it would do the trick, but sadly it didn't.  I also have
> > private e-mail conversations with various employees of the company, so> basically what using "from:@thiscompany.com<from...@thiscompany.com> ->to:@thiscompany.com<to...@thiscompany.com>" did
> > was filter out the messages they'd sent to the mailing list and only
> > showed me the private conversations I've had with them...which is
> > actually a nice little filter that I didn't previously have!  I was
> > just grouping any e-mail from them in one bunch.  I search for most
> > everything anyway, but it's nice to have that as a link now, so thanks
> > for that.
>
> > I don't think I expressed myself clearly originally.  I did my best,
> > but let me try again.
>
> > The company has five or six mailing lists, all of which I believe I'm
> > subscribed to.  I've set up filters for each mailing list so that
> > they're labeled accordingly.  To send an e-mail to the list, one would
> > send "to:list.thiscompany....@thiscompany.com". Most of the
> > discussions are between community members about various aspects of
> > programming and administration related to the use of this company's
> > products.  Being who they are and what they're known for, the
> > employees of the company chime in to offer help when they can.  Amidst
> > the e-mail traffic generated by the community, the messages sent from
> > these employees are usually lost in the shuffle.  To compound that
> > problem, when they do offer their words of wisdom, it's always
> > something significant that I want to know about and not possibly just
> > skim over, as I have a habit of doing.  So I set up a filter a while
> > back so that anything sent from an @thiscompany.com address would get
> > labeled so I'd see my (1) next to the label and know to check out what
> > was being said.  I used "@thiscompany.com", without the quotes, in the
> > From: field.  These were better times.
>
> > Then comes along this new subscriber who uses
> > list.thiscompany....@hisdoman.com as his e-mail address.  Now whenever
> > he sends a message to the list, the filter picks up the
> > "thiscompany.com" part of his e-mail address as being from them and
> > lets me know that he's posted.  I had assumed, incorrectly as it turns
> > out, that the filter would only look at the @ and whatever proceeds
> > it, but what it appears is that it's somewhat ignoring the placement
> > of the @ and as long as "thiscompany.com" exists anywhere in the e-
> > mail address, Gmail will apply the filter.
>
> > Yes, using "Has the Words:from:@thiscompany.com<from...@thiscompany.com>->from:@hisdomain.com<from...@hisdomain.com>"
> George Bernard Shaw <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23681.html>  - "If

Sean Murphy

unread,
Oct 17, 2009, 10:31:56 PM10/17/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
    Sorry I am behind in my email and just saw this. From what you write it looks to me like what you need is to filter on *@thiscompany.com rather than just @thiscompany.com . That should specify email addresses with the last part after the @ only. (The * is a 'wild card' character, which can stand in for any other characters, and preserves the structure of the email address intact.)

-0 1 - just my two bits

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 23:38, Rich <richa...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm having a bear of a time trying to figure out how to "fix" a filter
I currently have.  Everything's been kosher;  I'm using a filter to
label all emails from @thiscompany.com and archive them.  There are
various mailing lists offered by that company and I'm subscribed to a
few of them.  I use the filter to label messages sent from employees
of that company as they're the most important amongst the volumes of
noise.

Recently, someone decided to also subscribe using an account named

Andy

unread,
Oct 18, 2009, 11:54:18 AM10/18/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
> Sorry I am behind in my email and just saw this. From what you write it
> looks to me like what you need is to filter on *@thiscompany.com rather
> than just @thiscompany.com . That should specify email addresses with the
> last part after the @ only. (The * is a 'wild card' character, which can

I do not believe GMAIL uses any wildcards. (One of my big gripes with it!)

If wildcards are allowed in Gmail filters, are they documented somewhere?

Andy

Rich

unread,
Oct 18, 2009, 1:17:17 PM10/18/09
to Gmail-Users
I believe one of the first things I tried to change was to add a *
before the @, but that didn't help either.

On Oct 18, 11:54 am, Andy <AI.eg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >     Sorry I am behind in my email and just saw this. From what you write it
> > looks to me like what you need is to filter on *...@thiscompany.com rather

Sean Murphy

unread,
Oct 18, 2009, 10:10:09 PM10/18/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
    Sorry, I am one of those people who never reads the manual, so I don't know if they are documented. I never realized they weren't allowed, and have been using them and assuming they worked correctly. And since they were one of the first things Rich tried and it did not work, I am clearly mistaken in my assumption. The filter must be simply ignoring my oh-so-cleverly applied wild cards...

-0 1 - just my two bits


Andy

unread,
Oct 19, 2009, 9:53:49 AM10/19/09
to gmail...@googlegroups.com
Gmail's filters, unfortunately, ignore many things, apparently with no
work-around.

I learned long ago by first-hand experience that they ignore brackets,
including those around this group's name: [Gmail-Users]. You can
include the brackets in your search expression, but Gmail will ignore
them. (Try it! Do a search for ]]]Gmail/Users[ and see what comes
up.)

As for wildcards, I tried them too and they are ignored, and I think
it was in this group (a couple years ago) where someone else confirmed
that Gmail has no wildcards, either regex (Regular Expressions) or the
simple asterisk. Bummer.

The best that I can tell, is that Gmail treats all non-alphanumeric
characters ... including punctuation, brackets, '*', periods, and so
forth ... like whitespace. That is, they are word separators. Using
quotes around them doesn't help.

If anyone knows of some obscure form of wildcards that Gmail actually
does use, I (and I'm sure many others) would really like to hear about
it. I have yet to see any mentioned in the help pages. Not that I
often use them; I don't. But I do look at them once in a while.

Andy

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