(Preface: Target audience for this post is Gentoo Devs + GMail WebUI users, however, anyone that forwards bugmail to GMail and has procmail between them could also use this.)

I find it annoying that the GMail web interface chooses to thread messages based on subject name alone, this creates two threads for every new bug report sent to you from bugzilla. Sadly, we can’t control the threading that Google tells us is “the only way” (subject based threading or email header based threading, which bugzilla does correctly). If you want to follow the rabbit trail that I went on regarding this subject, I won’t stop you…

Or you can use procmail to rewrite the subject, that is, remove “New: “ from the first email:

# Remove "New: " from the subject so threading in gmail works
SUBJ_=`formail -xSubject: | expand | tr -d '\n' | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/New: //'`
:0
* ^From: [email protected]
{
    :0 fwh
    | formail -i"Subject: ${SUBJ_}"
}

Tangentially related that may be useful, is this rule that kills duplicate messages when you report a bug and are assigned the same bug (or in CC). The bugzilla software has no way of knowing what email aliases you may be in.

# Kill duplicate messages. If I am the reporter *and* the bug is assigned to a
# team I am in, delete the mail to me directly
:0
* ^To: [email protected]
* ^From: [email protected]
* ^X-Bugzilla-Reporter: [email protected]
* ^X-Bugzilla-(Assigned-To|CC):.*(team1|team2)@gentoo.org
/dev/null</pre>
<p></p>


*I like the GMail WebUI. I use it. Please don't suggest that I should use other clients, I already know that other clients can handle the threading fine.*