Topic on Talk:Phabricator/Help

I'm trying to ensure I'm alerted to direct mentions of my name (someone using @nskaggs) on tickets. Filtering mail doesn't seem to always work, and it would be useful to see these directly in the UI as well. Any advice or strategy on filtering for username mentions?

@NSkaggs (WMF) Hi, I'm not aware of any good way (like a list) in the web UI. One could query tasks for stuff like body:@nskaggs or comment:@nskaggs but that wouldn't allow sorting results by the date of these mentions.

How exactly do you filter mail?

I recognize that you asked about the UI, but if it helps, here is how I filter email, which works well for me (with the caveat that I like using email):

Filter:

How is this possible? With X-Stamps. Most email clients stash Phab email data in the header of the email, and you can point to that data. Gmail, however, strips it out, so you have to tell Phabricator to be explicit and put the data into the email itself. This also is required for filtering to work, since Gmail's filtering options are limited to a few simple searches. X-Stamps look something like this:

To get this into your Phab emails, change your settings here:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailformat/

and set Send Stamps to Mail Headers and Body.

After that, you can tell Gmail to filter on things like your @mentions. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help/Managing_mail for more info, and https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/mail_rules/ for more more info. This part is especially relevant:

When writing filter rules against mail stamps in Gmail, you should quote any filters you want to apply. For example, specify rules like this, with quotes:

"author(@alice)"

Note that Gmail will ignore some symbols when matching mail against filtering rules, so you can get false positives if the body of the message includes text like author alice (the same words in the same order, without the special symbols).

You'll also get false positives if the message body includes the text of a mail stamp explicitly in a normal text field like a summary, description, or comment.

There's no way to avoid these false positives other than using a different client with support for more powerful filtering rules, but these false positives should normally be uncommon.

Hope that helps, please ask any questions you may have. :)

Many thanks to both of you. @MBinder (WMF) I too would prefer an email based solution, and your description is perfect and should solve my problem! Fingers crossed on the next direct mention!