I’m trying to organize my work emails better. We get a lot of automated messages from our Jenkins build servers. I want to create a Gmail filter that puts these messages into a specific label and keeps them out of my inbox.
The tricky part is that I only want to match messages that have [RELEASE] at the start of the subject line. I’ve tried a bunch of different search terms, but they all end up matching any email with ‘release’ anywhere in the subject.
I know Gmail doesn’t use regular expressions like other email clients. Does anyone know if there’s a special way to tell Gmail to only look at the beginning of the subject line? Maybe something like atstart:[RELEASE]?
hey emma, i’ve got a trick for ya. try using ‘subject:"[RELEASE] "’ (with the space after]) in ur filter. it’s not perfect but works pretty good for catching those pesky jenkins emails at the start. gives ya more control than the other suggestions. lemme know if it helps!
I’ve found a reliable method for this type of filtering in Gmail. Instead of using ‘subject:[RELEASE]’, try ‘subject:[RELEASE]’. The key is to include the space after the closing bracket. This trick effectively matches emails where [RELEASE] is at the beginning of the subject line, followed by a space.
This approach has worked well for me in similar situations. It’s not a perfect solution, as it won’t catch subjects that start with [RELEASE] immediately followed by text without a space, but it’s generally effective for most automated emails.
Remember to test your filter thoroughly before applying it to ensure it’s catching the right emails and not missing any important ones.
I’ve actually dealt with this exact issue before, and I found a solution that works pretty well. Gmail doesn’t have a built-in way to match only the beginning of the subject line, but there’s a workaround.
Try using this in your filter: subject:“^[RELEASE]”
The caret symbol (^) tells Gmail to match the start of the subject line. You need to escape the square brackets with backslashes, or Gmail might interpret them as special characters.
This method has been working great for me with our build server emails. It catches all the [RELEASE] messages without grabbing everything else with ‘release’ in it. Just make sure you include the quotes around the whole thing.