Skip Inbox has stopped working

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

I use filters to classify several high-traffic mailing lists. Incoming mails are tagged with the appropriate label and do not appear in my Inbox. Thus I can review them at leisure without having to deal with each message as it arrives.

Which is kind of the whole point of filters.

This has worked perfectly for several years, but recently the "Skip Inbox" part of these filters has stopped working. Although the messages are correctly tagged, they all appear in my Inbox. I thus have to select them all and manually archive them to get the behaviour I want. This is especially difficult to do on an Android phone (nb: the Android Gmail app has no "select all" feature). I've careful reviewed the filters and can see nothing wrong. BTW I'm using "list:" as the matching criterion for these lists.

I suspect this problem arose when the new Inbox tab feature appeared, but I can't be sure. Currently I have these messages classified as Forum and that pretty much works, but I still have to do the manual archiving, which frankly sucks. Note that the problem already existed *before* I actually set up the tabs thing, so it may be purely coincidence.

I also have a Google Apps for Education account, with a similar setup (for a different set of mailing lists) and it still works perfectly.

poc

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

(Replying to myself)

I turned off the tabbed Inbox. It made no difference.

poc

[Zack (Doc)]

Patrick,

Have you checked your other filters and are sure none of them are firing on those messages?  I've had no problems with the "Skip Inbox" working for me, in fact this thread has been skipping it perfectly as it was set to do.  We have to remember that according to Google, all filters, including spam, act upon a message at once, and if they have contradictory actions, might cause unexpected results.  I've had a couple filters that did things like that, acted on messages I didn't intend, and found through experimentation which they were.  Then when I edited the filters to not hit the posts I didn't want them to hit, the problem went away.

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[Andy]

Are there multiple messages in the conversations that persist in the Inbox?  If you have conversation view ON (the default), if even one message in the conversation does not "Skip the Inbox" (that is, does not match the filter rules), it makes the whole conversation appear in the Inbox.  (Turn Conversation view OFF and you should see only that message in the Inbox; the rest should be archived.)

Were any messages in the conversation CC'd to you directly?  Some people routinely do a reply/all which makes a copy go to you directly, bypassing the list server.  Gmail discards the copy (ugh!), but keeps the message in the Inbox if either of the copies doesn't match the filter's "list" criterion.

Andy

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

Thanks Zack. I understand the principle, it's the application that's difficult. I have a lot of filters and tracking down exactly why a specific message is triggering one is non-trivial. I've looked carefully and can't see anything that would cause this. The filters for these lists are extremely simple (basically just a match on "list: <list-address>") and although occasionally I might get a message CCed to me directly, which would explain it ending up in my Inbox, this is not the case with most of them. These are high-traffic lists with lots of parallel threads, most of which I don't participate in.

I've tried exporting the filter rules and searching for unsuspected keywords in the XML file, but no dice.

It would be helpful if Gmail had a debugging option to trace exactly which filters were triggered by a given message, but I don't know if such a thing exists. Perhaps a new Labs feature? Maybe I'll suggest it.

poc

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[Patrick O'Callaghan]

Thanks, I understand that. See my reply to Zack for more on this.

poc

[Andy]

It would be helpful if Gmail had a debugging option to trace exactly which filters were triggered by a given message, but I don't know if such a thing exists. 

You could do some debugging yourself, though I realize it could be tedious if you have many.  Maybe there's an XML editor that could make it easier.  I'm thinking you could duplicate all of your filters; then have the first one assign a new label "filter1", and so on.  Then you could see which filter was responsible.

Andy

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

Yes, I guess that's one way, kind of like including debug statements in code, but rather tedious as you say.

I think I may have hit on what's going on but I'll wait a while for some more list traffic to come in and then report back if I turn out to be right.

poc

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

I *think* I have it figured out. Turns out that much of the list traffic (but not all, which is what made it confusing) was being labelled Important, and I had an option set to override filters for important messages. I must have set that a long time ago. I've turned it off and we'll see what happens.

My Google Apps account doesn't have that option set, which would explain why everything just worked.

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

Just to confirm: that was the problem. I fixed it by turning off the override.

poc

On Monday, 22 July 2013 18:02:22 UTC+1, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:

I *think* I have it figured out. Turns out that much of the list traffic (but not all, which is what made it confusing) was being labelled Important, and I had an option set to override filters for important messages. I must have set that a long time ago. I've turned it off and we'll see what happens.

My Google Apps account doesn't have that option set, which would explain why everything just worked.

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocal...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, I guess that's one way, kind of like including debug statements in code, but rather tedious as you say.

I think I may have hit on what's going on but I'll wait a while for some more list traffic to come in and then report back if I turn out to be right.

poc

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Andy <AI.e...@gmail.com> wrote:

It would be helpful if Gmail had a debugging option to trace exactly which filters were triggered by a given message, but I don't know if such a thing exists. 

You could do some debugging yourself, though I realize it could be tedious if you have many.  Maybe there's an XML editor that could make it easier.  I'm thinking you could duplicate all of your filters; then have the first one assign a new label "filter1", and so on.  Then you could see which filter was responsible.

Andy

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