Useful GMail filter tip

As anyone who works at Google will tell you e-mail is a major part of life and we get A LOT of it. For example I received over 200 e-mails just yesterday, and that number is only going to go up over time as I become further assimilated. Since we use GMail internally for everything I've naturally begun to play around with its filtering capabilities in earnest.

One major concern that I have (and I'm sure many others share) is now that I have agents that are automatically managing my e-mail for me how do I trust that they're doing the right thing? Obviously for this system to work to my advantage I need to trust that it's doing the right thing and trust it to the point that I don't feel like I need to check up on it frequently.

A nice feature of GMail is that when you define a filter it optionally asks you if you'd like to run the filter on the mail you've already received. This provides a convenient way to test things out on the mail you already have in order to make sure that the filters work. This is nice because you don't have to wait for new emails to come in to know that your filter is broken. This alone isn't enough to ensure that your filters work, for that you really need to test them on new mail.

When testing filters on newly incoming messages I've found that it's useful to put into place a safety net to ensure that I don't miss anything that's important. For me this safety net will tag every incoming message with an additional label (I call it "new"). This way I can check up on my filters by looking at only the new messages that have been received since I changed the filters. I can then very quickly look at the mail tagged with the "new" label and know whether or not something was missing a label or incorrectly labeled. To setup the filter which applies the "new" label I use the "Has the words:" field with an advanced search operator of "to:(me OR -me)". Here's a screenshot:



I use this for a few days after changing my filters just to make sure I didn't mess anything up. So far has been working pretty well for me.