It seems like most developers at Mozilla have their own optimized bugmail workflow, but today a conversation on IRC inspired me to share mine.

I created a set of gmail filters to group my bugmail into buckets of varying importance. Although gmail doesn’t support filtering based on email headers, I found that string matches do a pretty good job (since most people don’t write things like “You are the assignee for the bug” in a bug comment).

Here’s how I group the things I care about:

Matches: from:(bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org) subject:((review requested:) OR (feedback requested:))
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “b:review”

Matches: from:(bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org) “You are the assignee for the bug.”
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “b:assigned”

Matches: from:(bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org) (“You are on the CC list for the bug.” OR “You reported the bug.”) -{“You are the assignee for the bug.”}
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “b:cc”

And here’s how I catch everything else:

Matches: from:(bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org) -{“You are on the CC list for the bug.” OR “You reported the bug.” OR “You are the assignee for the bug.” OR “review requested:” OR “feedback requested:”}
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “b”

This is how I can get away with watching the whole Firefox for Android component, but still make sure I see important bugmail in a timely fashion. It’s especially excellent for post-vacation catch-up!