Mute doesn't work

[joech4n]

Muted messages are caught by the catch-all rule (which moves the email to inbox), but removing the catch-all rule generates errors in gmail-automata (see below). The root cause may be that Gmail filtering ignores -{label:mute} in the default filter and so it gets tagged with unprocessed label regardless. Do you have any suggestions to allow Gmail mute functionality to continue working?

Log for error when I remove the catch-all rule with redacted personal info:

Captured an error: Some processing fails, check emails

Tue Oct 12 14:57:20 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished getEmail successfully in 47ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:21 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished GetConfigValues successfully in 552ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:21 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished getConfigs successfully in 561ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:21 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished getLabels successfully in 524ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:22 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished GetRuleValues successfully in 257ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:22 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished getRules successfully in 334ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:22 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished fetchUnprocessedThreads successfully in 165ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:22 PDT 2021 INFO: Found 2 unprocessed threads.
Tue Oct 12 14:57:22 PDT 2021 INFO: Ignoring oldest 3 messages in thread "some email""
Tue Oct 12 14:57:23 PDT 2021 INFO: Ignoring oldest 2 messages in thread "some other email"
Tue Oct 12 14:57:23 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished transformIntoThreadData successfully in 736ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:23 PDT 2021 INFO: Process email failed: Thread "some email"" from someone <email1@gmail.com> to email <email2@gmail.com> has no action, does it match any rule?
Tue Oct 12 14:57:23 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished collectActions successfully in 94ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:23 PDT 2021 INFO: Processed 1 out of 2.
Tue Oct 12 14:57:24 PDT 2021 INFO: Updated labels: a/auto-inbox.
Tue Oct 12 14:57:25 PDT 2021 INFO: Updated threads status.
Tue Oct 12 14:57:26 PDT 2021 INFO: Mark as processed.
Tue Oct 12 14:57:26 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished BatchApply successfully in 3614ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:26 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished applyAllActions successfully in 3643ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:27 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished addStatRecord successfully in 216ms
Tue Oct 12 14:57:27 PDT 2021 INFO: Finished processEmails failed in 6398ms: undefined
Message: undefined

Perhaps this is tangentially related to:

• How does automata process incoming threads? Unprocessed messages only? Unread messages only? #44
• Filter setup to archive unprocessed threads only if they weren't already in inbox? #9

[ranmocy]

It may due to the second Gmail filter:

Matches: from:(YOUR_EMAIL@gmail.com) to:(YOUR_EMAIL@gmail.com)
Do this: Apply label "0unprocessed"

My idea was since the email is sent to you directly, it's considered as an important email. But I think you may change the condition to ignore muted emails?

Matches: from:(YOUR_EMAIL@gmail.com) to:(YOUR_EMAIL@gmail.com) -{label:mute}
Do this: Apply label "0unprocessed"

[joech4n]

Unfortunately that still applies 0unprocessed label to muted threads with a new incoming message, which then eventually gets caught by catch-all rule to bring it into the inbox.

I think the root cause may be that Gmail filtering ignores -{label:mute} in the default filter and so it gets tagged with unprocessed label regardless. Perhaps one solution is to support filtering by existing labels in gmail-automata? Then we could use a custom mute label to have automata auto-archive threads with this mute label.

Another thing I tried was forwarding messages I want to mute to myemail+muted@gmail.com, then creating a rule in automata to autoarchive the messages. But as mentioned in #44 (comment), automata doesn't look at messages older than 2 unprocessed windows ago so that didn't work.

[joech4n]

Actually, I think there is a way for Automata to solve this. Would it be possible to add a new move_to action that does "nothing"? That way the message will stay archived by Gmail and Automata won't bring it back in to the inbox...

Update: Nevermind, I don't think that will work because then we need to create a filter that can look at muted messages.

But, could we make Automata aware of a custom muted label and just not process messages that are tagged with it? Maybe that is the fix.

[mlsad3]

@joech4n ,

Does automata have rules / conditions that are based on existing labels? I didn't see that in the code. If not, do we have a feature request for that? Or would this Issue be the request?

[joech4n]

Automata doesn't currently have this functionality. Filtering by label would be my preferred way to solve my problem, because that feature is also useful for other rules, but I'm not sure if the maintainer would prefer that in a separate Github issue though...

[mlsad3]

I've got that implemented in PR #69 where you can do something like:

(thread label My/Label)

It only matches labels that were pre-existing.