Filtering on List-Id in Gmail

One of my biggest gripes about gmail has been its rather infantile filtering capabilities. I've used procmail quite heavily for many years, so functionality-wise, I'm perhaps a bit spoilt.

Recently, however, I discovered that the Has the words field in the filter editor apparently supports a keyword called listid. I've not been able to verify that this actually expands to the various forms of List-Id headers, but at least it worked for all the lists I wanted to filter.

An example might clarify. Say I want to filter the Stratego CVS list, which has the following mail header:

List-Id: CVS notifications for Stratego and XT repositories <stratego-cvs.cs.uu.nl>

I entered the following in Gmail's Has the words field:

listid: stratego-cvs.cs.uu.nl

This seemed to do the trick.

You might wonder why using List-Id would be necessary since most lists use a [list-name] prefix anyway. In many instances, I get a reply that's both to my own address with a Cc to the list. This effectively provides me with two e-mails. I want to have the list-mail placed in the list, and the one address directly to me in my Inbox. Call me neurotic, but I'm a bit particular about this.

Another reason why List-Id is necessary for me, is the Apache harmony-dev list. This list uses many different [xx] prefixes, such as [classlib], [general], [build], depending on which service generated the message. I'd hate to maintain multiple filters for this case.