Filter out notifications from github except those from specific users

Question

I belong to a Github organization and am being overwhelmed by notifications sent to the various repos in that org. I have a team of people whose notifications I do need to see; I'd like to filter out every other message.

These notifications have from fields such as:

Guy DeFalt <notifications@github.com> SomeGithubUsername <notifications@github.com> Grace Hopper <notifications@github.com>

Ideally, I'd like to auto-archive anything matching a GMail filter like:

-{"Guy DeFalt" OR "SomeGithubUsername" OR "Grace Hopper"} AND from:notifications@github.com

However, this doesn't work: notifications that include, say, Grace Hopper are still being filtered out. How do you filter out all messages from a specific email address except those of particular, specific people?

Answer 1

You can setup the filter for the FROM address field to reflect both a person's display name and email address as follows:

Guy DeFalt <notifications@github.com>

Additionally, if you want just one filter for multiple email addresses you can use a logical OR between parentheses wrapped name/email pairs

For your example use case, you'd set up the filter's From field as:

(Guy DeFalt <notifications@github.com>) OR (SomeGithubUsername <notifications@github.com>) OR (Grace Hopper <notifications@github.com>)

You can use the SEARCH button to test the filter before applying/saving it.

Answer 2

Multiple levels of conditions can be programmed by using labels (source).

So you can achieve the desired "delete, except..." requirement by doing:

1. Take new emails from your desired contacts and label them as "stop processing"
2. Take new emails from GitHub that are not labeled "stop processing" and delete them

You can set the "stop processing" label to not be shown on the sidebar or on message lists to minimize the impact of this artifact on your visual experience.