How to create Gmail filter searching for text only at start of subject line

Question

We receive regular automated build messages from Jenkins build servers at work   It d be nice to ferret these away into a label  skipping the inbox   Using a filter is of course the right choice   The desired identifier is the string  RELEASE  at the beginning of a subject line   Attempting to specify any of the following regexes causes emails with the string release in any case anywhere in the subject line to be matched     RELEASE       RELEASE      RELEASE       RELEASE       From what I ve read subsequently  Gmail doesn t have standard regex support  and from experimentation it seems  as with google search  special characters are simply ignored    I m therefore looking for a search parameter which can be used  maybe something like atstart mystring in keeping with their has   in  notations   Is there a way to force the match only if it occurs at the start of the line  and only in the case where square brackets are included   Sincere thanks

User · Answer

I was wondering how to do this myself  it seems Gmail has since silently implemented this feature  I created the following filter   Matches  subject   test   Do this  Skip Inbox   And then I sent a message with the subject   test  foo   And the message was archived  So it seems all that is necessary is to create a filter for the subject prefix you wish to handle

User · Answer

Regex is not on the list of search features  and it was on  more or less  as Better message search functionality  i e  Wildcard and partial word search   the list of pre-canned feature requests  so the answer is  you cannot do this via the Gmail web UI   -    There are no current Labs features which offer this  SIEVE filters would be another way to do this  that too was not supported  there seems to no longer be any definitive statement on SIEVE support in the Gmail help      Updated for link rot The pre-canned list of feature requests was  er canned  the original is on archive org dated 2012  now you just get redirected to a dumbed down page telling you how to give feedback  Lack of SIEVE support was covered in answer 78761 Does Gmail support all IMAP features   since some time in 2015 that answer silently redirects to the answer about IMAP client configuration  archive org has a copy dated 2014    With the current search facility brackets of any form          are used for grouping  they have no observable effect if there s just one term within  Using   aaa bbb  and  aaa bbb  are equivalent and will both find words aaa or bbb  Most other punctuation characters  including    are treated as a space or a word-separator    -   and   do have special meaning though  see the help   As of 2016  only the form   term1 term2   is documented for this  and is equivalent to the search  term1 OR term2    You can do regex searches on your mailbox  within limits  programmatically via Google docs  http   www labnol org internet advanced-gmail-search 21623  has source showing how it can be done  copy the document  then Tools  gt  Script Editor to get the complete source    You could also do this via IMAP as described here     Python IMAP search for partial subject and script something to move messages to different folder  The IMAP SEARCH verb only supports substrings  not regex  Gmail search is further limited to complete words  not substrings   further processing of the matches to apply a regex would be needed    For completeness  one last workaround is  Gmail supports plus addressing  if you can change the destination address to youraddress jenkinsrelease gmail com it will still be sent to your mailbox where you can filter by recipient address  Make sure to filter using the full email address to youraddress jenkinsrelease gmail com  This is of course more or less the same thing as setting up a dedicated Gmail address for this purpose  -

User · Answer

The only option I have found to do this is find some exact wording and put that under the  Has the words  option  Its not the best option  but it works

[regex] How to create Gmail filter searching for text only at start of subject line?

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