My company recently switched to Google Apps. One of the implications of this is that I can use Gmail's mail filters. Since - like many company - I get a daily plethora of list emails, I thought I'd create a simple rule to filter them down to only the ones that require my attention.
Attempt #1:
Matches: -{Toby}
Do this: Skip Inbox
This rule says that if the email does not have my name in it anywhere, then skip the Inbox(like Google Search, "-" is the NOT operator). This worked fairly well, but I found that there were some false positives after a week or so of using it. So it needed some tuning up.
Attempt #2:
Matches: to:(-my@company.email) -{Toby Birthday}
Do this: Skip Inbox
I found that once in a while, there'd be a message addressed to me directly, but would not have my name in the message. I fixed this by putting -my@company.email in the To field of the filter(replace my@company.email with your own email). So, this filter will only apply to mail not addressed directly to me - the ones sent to mailing lists, basically. Also, I'd like to be notified of people's birthday, so I added the word Birthday to the doesn't-have list.
Attempt #3:
Whenever I request support, I always first get a message first that says: Thank you for your support request. This is pretty uninformative, so I don't need to be alerted to them. So I added the rule:
Matches: from:(our@support.email) Thank you for your support request.
Do this: Skip Inbox
That's what I've got so far. This post will be updated as I further fine tune my mail filters.
Update: I found that it's a bad idea to ignore the email HR sends out the the mailing list, so I modified the first rule to let her in:
Attempt #4:
Matches: to:(-my@company.email) -{Toby Birthday} from:(-hr@company.email}
Do this: Skip Inbox