Eliminate Buzz Inbox Clutter Without Deactivation

Feb 12, 2010 // Blog Posts // Lena // 1 Comment

Two days ago, I turned on Buzz in my main (non-spam/social network) gmail account to somewhat disastrous results. After adding a few posts and commenting on others to try it out, suddenly my inbox was filling up with Buzz notifications. Gmail proper, of course, elegantly collapses these into one thread (at least), but on the iPhone, all hell broke loose. My inbox quickly filled with the equivalent of a chat room conversation.

Now I will say, as far as chat room conversation goes, this was pretty interesting, but not having access to real email without parsing through clutter wasn’t exactly great for my productivity.

Since I kinda like Buzz…definitely enough to keep it turned on, anyway, I quickly came up with a filter fix that causes all incoming Buzz conversation messages to skip my inbox entirely and go directly to a folder where I can read them when I’m bored.

Here’s how you can set this up:

1. select any buzz message in your inbox in gmail’s web client.
2. Click on the More Options drop-down and select filter messages like these
3. In the subject field in the filter setup menu that appears, type Buzz:
4. Test the filter (unfortunately gmail currently ignores punctuation, so if anyone uses the word buzz in their subject line, these messages will also have the filter applied to them. Fortunately it’s an uncommon word).
5. Click next step
6. Check the following options: Skip the Inbox (Archive it), apply the label (create a new one called google buzz)
7. check the little box marked: Also apply filter to ## conversations below.and click on the create filter button.
8. …and you’re done…hooray!
This will allow you to access your buzz conversations out of line from your standard inbox everywhere you access email (including on the iphone) so long as you have your external clients set up using IMAP. Because we’ve skipped the inbox, your phone won’t go insane alerting you to messages that aren’t important. Pretty neat :)