Filter replies to a mailing list in Gmail

Question

i have a company wide mail list ([email protected]) from which important messages are sent time to time.

What isn't important is the dolts who reply all to this address.

Is there a way to create a filter? We use Google Apps for email and new users are added to the list. I tried a couple versions of replyto: [email protected] but no luck.

Answer 1

Filtering messages that are sent to the list is the easy part:

list:"list.name"

The list.name must be replaced with your list name, which can be hard to find. But click on a message to the list, and from the drop-down menu (next to the Reply button), select Filter messages like these. This will give you a pre-filled Create filter dialog with the list name already set.

But you want to only filter replies to the list, not the first message in each thread. To do so, you would think that combining list:"list.name" with a subject match on Re: would do:

list:"list.name" subject:"Re: "

... but this will also match messages that happen to include re anywhere in the subject.

So the best solution is perhaps modifying the settings for the group. If you're the group administrator (or can influence the group administrator), you could set the default Reply to option to something other than the default, which is Users decide where their replies are sent:

By changing this to To the author of the message only, the sender must make an active choice to spam the whole group, by CCing the group address.

Answer 2

That might be a tough nut to crack. I might try a filter like:

To: [email protected]
Subject: Re:

Assuming the dolts' email client uses the slightly standard "Re:" prefix on replies this might work.

If the original messages are coming from [email protected], you might be able to catch the replies with:

Has the words: (to:[email protected]) -(from:[email protected])

That will hit on messages sent to company-all but which aren't from company-all.

It's hard to give helpful examples without real email messages to work with. Perhaps you could post some anonymized headers in your question for messages that you do and do not want to filter.