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.

  1. 1000 character chunks - I took my 4000 character list of student-employee emails, and split it into 1000 character chunks.
  2. 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.