I have one person who never fails to reply “Thanks!” whenever appropriate, usually Reply All. This is bad enough, right? But she also never fails to reply “You’re welcome!” to every email where anybody says “thanks.”
Is it possible to set up a filter that deletes or hides messages that contain ONLY those phrases? I need to be careful; it can’t delete a message that has the phrase buried somewhere in the text, or further down the chain of replies and forwards – that would be practically all of them. But when a new reply comes in with no more content than the bare words “thanks” or “you’re welcome”, I could really do with having that bypass my inbox.
If I could solve this for such emails from just one specific person, that would be 95% of the problem solved right there. I could reach out personally with a request, but guaranteed she’d be hurt and I’d be a heel.
I dug through gmail’s native search filters and couldn’t find any solution that wouldn’t risk unintentionally filtering other emails. There doesn’t appear to be an operator that says “filter emails that contain ONLY this precise message.”
I also have no idea what would happen if you started deleting messages inside ongoing email chains.
BigT is an accomplished scripter, though, so he might be able to come up with an external solution for you.
Thank you @Johnny_Bravo! That’s what I figured. @BigT, even if you were to very generously offer such a thing, please don’t trouble to do so, because there’s no way I’d be able to use a script – this is a very tightly controlled work computer.
I do delete the messages that contain the unneeded expressions as they come in. Since I don’t use Conversation View, this works fine. Appreciate all the thoughts here.
Well, unless it’s a work-issued computer you can’t install onto, you have the option of using an actual email program. They continue to exist precisely because they can give you more granular control.
Right, work computer, can’t install anything. This is what I meant by not having any options, but obviously that wasn’t very clear. I’d kill for a real mail client.
Oh, I could. Perhaps even should. But I’ve found in the Northwest Nice culture I live in, people just don’t ask other people to modify their behavior for any reason, in any tone. They will be offended for the rest of their lives. It really is a thing up here; it’s Not Done.
Just wanted to add that I’ve still spent less time in this thread than I do in an average month of opening and deleting emails that say “Thanks!” and “You’re welcome!”
This is your strictly-controlled work computer? So you’re reading and dealing with these superfluous messages On Company Time? Maybe there’s no problem with that. You’re getting paid for it.
hahaha. Sure, I get paid for the work of deleting emails while I’m on the clock. Don’t most people (hourly employees) get paid for the most tedious task they must do? But doesn’t everyone also like to increase efficiency a bit?
I get hundreds of emails a day, and every single one has to be read to see if I need to do something about it. Every little time savings helps me do my job better.
I know what you mean. I am currently dealing with the same sort of sensitivity over someone who likes to send direct messages as a long stream of tiny fragments of sentences - like, instead of saying “Hi, how are you? It’s cold here today”, it’s:
Hi
How are you?
It’s cold
here
today
(and each of these messages generates a notification sound, and there’s no way to tame that without turning off all notification sounds for all respondents in the app). I don’t want to tell them to stop doing that because it seems incredibly petty.
If this was happening in a business context where both ends of the conversation take place in the same company, then policies can be made to bring about sanity - the exact problems you’re describing (‘thanks’ emails and abuse of reply-all) were strongly discouraged by the email policy I wrote for the last company I worked for.
Just looking at the filtering options in gmail, I feel they are just a trifle too blunt for the surgery that is required here. - you can filter for: contains ‘thanks’ and less than a specific size in bytes, but unless this person replies in exactly the same annoying way with great consistency, it’s only going to catch some messages.
Edit: also, I am not sure the size parameter in the filter is actually just talking about the message field. It could be referring to the entire transferred message including all of the headers and such.
Right, and it seems like it would also include the whole chain of replies and forwards and inline images and so forth, even with conversation view off.
If the person sending the annoying replies is using GMail themself, it’s possible they’re just using the auto-reply buttons in GMail. Click on the blue “Thank you!” button, click Send.
I just tried it between two accounts, and did a “View Source” on the reply.
So there’s a nonbreaking space after the exclamation mark. You might be able to set a filter in your own GMail to detect “Thank you!” followed by the nonbreaking space, because normal people (or even Minnesota Nice™ people) wouldn’t put a nonbreaking space there.
But then you might get somebody replying to the thank-you note with some actually relevant info, and they would get filtered out too because they’d be quoting the thank-you.
If you run out of options for automatically deleting the messages, you could try writing up something that looks like an automatic response, something along the lines of:
Except for making it look like it was generated automatically, that message wouldn’t even be a lie, because “this system” includes the operator.
Have that ready in a text file to copy & paste ASAP every time you get one of their identical messages. You can shrug your shoulders and say “Sorry, that’s my new anti-spam system.”
