Topic on Talk:Phabricator/Help

See Phabricator/Help/Managing mail

Hi all --

I have been thinking lately about how to deal with massive incoming numbers of Phabricator emails. In particular, I am wondering if anyone has ideas on how to configure Gmail filters to sift incoming emails into "projects that I am currently working on" and "other projects". To be specific, I am a product manager with the Growth team at WMF. I receive incoming emails that are about the specific tickets that the engineers on the Growth team are working on, which need my attention right away. Then there are the emails that are about other projects that the team has worked on in the past, which need to be triaged later.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

This topic has been on my personal backlog for a while so you made me create https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T202153 (help welcome). https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/mail_rules/ is probably the best I can point to currently.

@MMiller (WMF) The X-Phabricator-Stamps portion of a raw Gmail message might support your needs, when combined with a filter's search. Choose a couple of emails that fit into your buckets and then find the 3-dot icons near the Reply and Star icons. In the 3-dot menu is an option to "Show original" which will open the current email in raw form. Within that is something called "X-Phabricator-Stamps" which are the codes that Phab sends out in an email notification. See if there are unique elements on which you can filter, which are consistent to the buckets you define for yourself.

Getting Gmail to see the stamps in a filter requires them to be in the body of the message (because it doesn't provide an option for filtering on headers), so you need to change that in your Phab settings, under Email Format. Change the "Send Stamps" option from "Default (Mail Headers)" to "Mail Headers and Body". Then your filters will pick up the differences (and the stamps will show in the body of the emails you get, which is a little noisier). As @AKlapper (WMF)'s link mentions, this might lead to some false positives, but those should be uncommon.

Full disclosure, I don't do this, so I'm not sure how well it works, but I agree with it in theory. I'll change my own settings and experiment. :)

See Phabricator/Help/Managing mail - edits welcome!

Thanks, @AKlapper (WMF) and @MBinder (WMF). I am going to try the stamps approach. Would it be frowned upon to make a Phabricator tag just for myself? Of issues that I care about?

Not sure what you mean by "tag just for yourself"...

Do you refer to having your own personal workboard? If so, we have personal "User" projects for that, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Types_of_Projects and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T555

But I am not sure yet which exact underlying problem you'd like to solve. :)

Like a global stamp for everyone? Probably (I dunno if that's even possible). But there are a few existing approaches you might want to try before anything like that. You can filter on tasks you authored, tasks you are mentioned in, and tasks that you have flagged, among other things, and combine those with things like Priority level. :)