Tagging Groups in GMail
In my job, I’ll never possibly be able to answer all of my emails. We’re two people managing 160+ part-time student employees. I do prioritize answering students’ emails over normal ones, but it’s hard to filter out that many email addresses.
##GMail’s Limitations & A Workaround GMail has a character limit on filters - a blog post said it’s somewhere between 1500 and 2000 characters. That’s only ~40 emails you can filter at once.
So I created multiple filters that do the same thing.
- 1000 character chunks - I took my 4000 character list of student-employee emails, and split it into 1000 character chunks.
- Curly Braces - GMail gave me a warning about long operations, but it went away when I used curly braces around it. I got the idea from another blog post - I’m being kinda superstitious. It’s hard to test this sort of thing.
I then created a label-applying filter (apply label “fromst”), with the following string in the ‘from’ field:
{[email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected] OR [email protected]}
To make it even more useful, I thought it deserved to be a “multiple
inbox” with the filter label:inbox label:fromst
.
Casey Watts! studied neurobiology at Yale University, and he is a co-author on several neurobiology papers. He has also worked in software development for 10 years, including at Heroku. Casey is an independent author based in Washington, DC.
Casey is the author of Debugging Your Brain. This book brings together two parts of Casey's background: psychology and software development.
Debugging Your Brain (DYB) is a clear applied psychology book and a concise self-help book. Whether or not you have a technical background, you will find the software development analogies approachable and insightful. You will likely reference and re-read DYB many times, each time discovering new insights.