OT: Gmail filters return *too* much

[Dudley Brooks]

Sorry to post this here, but the gmail forums don't seem to have as many
knowledgeable people or to respond as fast, and I know there are lots of
people on this ng who are quite familiar with gmail.

The gmail filters seem to find not only the message which has the word
you are searching on, but *every* message in that thread (or whatever
the name is that gmail uses for thread). So if there are twenty
messages in a thread and *one* of them has "John Doe" in it, the filter
returns all twenty. Since I'm using filters to send messages to folders
(labels in gmail) this clutters up the folders with messages which don't
belong there.

Is there a setting to change this behavior to the more desirable one of
only returning relevant messages?

My gmail account is IMAP. So even though I use TB almost exclusively,
I'm using the filters in gmail rather than in TB (i.e. rather than smart
folders), mostly because I want to see the folder structure if I'm away
from home and don't have access to TB, but partly because the filters
and smart folders in TB seem to take too long to work on an IMAP account.

Thanks.

[Roger]

Use:
in:label string

examples:
in:inbox John Doe
in:spam John Doe
in:your_label John Doe

Label is any label you create.

[Dudley Brooks]

That would only work if the label is already on the message. I'm using
the filter to *put* the label on the message in the first place.
(That's one of the actions that filters can do.) And it's putting the
label on too many messages.

[Dudley Brooks]

Never mind. I just found out in Gmail Forums, that gmail *forces*
everything (searching, sorting, filtering) to be done in entire
"conversations", which supposedly means threads, but actually means
subject lines. Apparently people have been complaining about this
"feature" for years, and Google hasn't done anything about it.

If only there could be an open-source, user-modifiable, online mail
service! (I can dream, can't I?)

[goodwin]

On 11/20/2009 07:44 AM Dudley Brooks scribbled:

>
> If only there could be an open-source, user-modifiable, online mail
> service! (I can dream, can't I?)

it often seems that spammers already have just such a service...

[Leonidas Jones]

Dudley Brooks wrote:
> Dudley Brooks wrote:
>> Roger wrote:
>>> On 11/19/2009 12:01 PM, Dudley Brooks wrote:

/snip/

>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> Use:
>>> in:label string
>>>
>>> examples:
>>> in:inbox John Doe
>>> in:spam John Doe
>>> in:your_label John Doe
>>>
>>> Label is any label you create.
>>
>> That would only work if the label is already on the message. I'm using
>> the filter to *put* the label on the message in the first place.
>> (That's one of the actions that filters can do.) And it's putting the
>> label on too many messages.
>
> Never mind. I just found out in Gmail Forums, that gmail *forces*
> everything (searching, sorting, filtering) to be done in entire
> "conversations", which supposedly means threads, but actually means
> subject lines. Apparently people have been complaining about this
> "feature" for years, and Google hasn't done anything about it.
>
> If only there could be an open-source, user-modifiable, online mail
> service! (I can dream, can't I?)

If I were not able to read Gmail in SeaMonkey or Thunderbird, I would
not be able to use. Yes, we've been complaining about "conversations"
from the beginning, but they won't do anything about it. I don't even
try to look at my Gmail accounts on their web interface anymore.

Lee

[Dudley Brooks]

It's ironic, because Google was the company that realized that search
engines work better if they search on something other than predefined,
set-in-stone categories. Now they have a category ("conversations") set
in stone, and it's not even a well though-out category.