How do you auto-archive chat/hangout messages in Gmail?

Question

I use hangouts on Android and on the desktop (browser extension) and these messages periodically appear in my Gmail inbox. So every day I'm having to manually archive all these hangout messages that have appeared in my inbox.

(In my case it is really just 1 hangout with 1 person. Opening any of these hangout messages gives me access to the entire hangout, just at a different point in the conversation.)

How can I auto-archive these hangout messages in Gmail? There does not seem to be a "hangouts" filter?

I've noticed this question (asked yesterday) which suggests that the archiving of hangout messages is normal behaviour, but they have set up a filter that has apparently broken this!? I don't have any filters set for the user in question.

Answer 1

It appears that chat/hangout messages are auto-archived in Gmail afterall - providing you don't have any filters set on the user you are chatting with! (This sounds like a bug if you ask me!)

I previously had a filter set on this particular user that simply prevented any emails from that user being seen as spam - but this was apparently enough to prevent all hangout messages from that user being archived. I had, however, already deleted this filter - but it appears to have taken some time for the system to catch up, since I was still getting hangout messages in my inbox after I had initially deleted the filter.

Thanks to Grzegorz for help in diagnosing this.

Answer 2

I had the same problem but your solution did not apply to my case. Instead, the following filter works for me:

Matches: label:chats label:inbox

Do this: Skip Inbox

I had originally matched against "in:chats" and "in:inbox", but Gmail automatically converts those. Don't get concerned when a warning pops up when creating this filter.

Filter searches containing "label:", "in:", "is:", or stars criteria (i.e. "has:yellow-star") are not recommended as they will never match incoming mail. Do you still wish to continue to the next step?

This is perfectly fine for me since chat history is not what I would consider "incoming mail".

Answer 3

I set up a new filter that looks for @profiles.google.com as part of the sender and immediately archives those. It seems to be working well.