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Managing Bugmail with Mozilla Mail

by ASA DOTZLER | Managing your bugmail with Mozilla mail filters is fun and easy!

If you're anything like me then you get way too much bugmail and you're thrilled to hear about new ways to better manage bugspam. A Bugzilla change, along with a Mozilla Mail filters fix can make managing your bugmail a bit easier. The change in Bugzilla is the addition of a new header called X-Bugzilla-Reason. The Mozilla Mail filters fix is for bug 16902, the ability to filter on arbitrary mail headers. The header can have any of the values AssignedTo, CC, QAContact, Reporter, and Voter and describes why you are receiving the bugmail. Using filters to sort your bugmail into different folders based the BugzillaReason header can make dealing with bugmail less painful and it's fairly simple.

To get you started I'll explain how to set up a filter to help you organize all the bugmail you get for bugs where you are the reporter. To set this filter up launch Mozilla Mail and select Message Filters from the Edit menu. In the Message Filter window click New. Now give the filter a name (ex. "I'm the Reporter"). From the first of the three selects choose the Customize item and type "X-Bugzilla-Reason" into the New Message Header field then click OK. Now select X-Bugzilla-Reason from the first select, select Contains from the second select and type "Reporter" into the third field. With the filter criteria set up you'll need to pick an action for that filter. You can select "Move to Folder" in the Perform this action section and choose or create a folder for keeping those bugs where you are the reporter. You may want to set up a similar filter for bugmail you receive because you are CC:'d on a bug. If you are a defualt QA contact or have a lot of bugs assigned to you then you might also want to set up filters for those headers. (see bug 71560 for how this feature could be expanded to allow filtering on specific changes to the bug).

I'm sure that others here have come up with interesting bugmail management techniques (Ctrl+A, Delete comes to mind) and lots bugs have been filed for making this all easier. Some of these bugs I'm following are 72132, 31314, 14137, and 26943. Take a minute and share your approach and experiences with Bugzilla and bugmail by clicking the Talkback link below.

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