How do I Filter out Facebook group mails?

August 18, 2009 11:16 PM

I'm a member of hundreds of Facebook groups, which I enjoy except for the fact that their owners sometimes send me a direct email. The result is dozens of direct emails that I can't seem to find a setting inside Facebook to block. So then I move to my Gmail filters. Is there a way to filter out the Facebook group mails using Gmail filters? The identifying feature of mails from groups is that their subject header contains quote marks, so the sender is always Facebook and the subject header is always: "Group Name" sent you a message on Facebook. My question is: how do I teach Gmail to distinguish between these mails and mails from my actual friends, which don't have the quote marks around them?
posted by skylar to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Took me a couple minutes of piddling, but I figured it out. This worked for me, 99% sure it'll work for you:

Subject: "sent you a message on facebook..."
Has the Words: "message to the members"

This little hack makes use of the face that emails sent to groups say "Such and such sent a message to the members of such and such group." Unless your friend sends you a message with "message to the members" in it, I don't foresee very many false-positives, either.
posted by Precision at 11:30 PM on August 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I've done a test search and set up the filter. It looks good so far.

As Precision says, "Unless your friend sends you a message with 'message to the members' in it, I don't foresee very many false-positives, either." I agree at this stage.

Rubbstone, the question was all about distinguishing between messages from Facebook groups generally and messages from my Facebook friends. I want the latter to land in my inbox and the former to be filtered out. Precision's technique looks good.

Thanks!
posted by skylar at 11:39 PM on August 18, 2009

Pleasure.
posted by Precision at 11:42 PM on August 18, 2009

To block them on Facebook:

Settings (in the upper right corner of the screen) > Application Settings > Groups (you may have to change the menu view to find this app) > Edit Settings > Additional Permissions

There, you'll find a list of things your groups are allowed to email you about. Disable anything you don't want.
posted by decathecting at 12:18 PM on August 19, 2009