Archiving mailing list messages but not replies to my own posts

Sometimes I sign up to a mailinglist and want to see replies to my own threads but not have my inbox overtaken by everything else.

I can set up a filter in Gmail to label the mailing list posts and archive them, obviously, but then replies to my own threads (or threads I've participated in) are not obvious.

So let's make a more sophisticated filter, to match all messages with the relevant List-ID header except those which mention my messages in their References header.

After a few test queries it seems that search queries of the form References:*@segnus matches messages replying to things I sent from my laptop. The negative version -References:*@segnus appears to match the opposite. So it's not hard to add more negatives to avoid matching messages from my other machines and to build up a final query:

List:django-users.googlegroups.com -References:*@segnus -References:*@t900 -References:*@perihelion

This then goes in the "includes the words" box of the filter, and is set to apply a label and skip the inbox.

It's possible that other people send messages with Message-ID headers like mine and so I'd get some extra messages in my inbox, but I can live with that.

This doesn't seem to work quite correctly on existing messages. I'm guessing this is because Gmail sees the messages in the thread before any of them referenced me -- my original message or the existing conversation before I turned up -- and those messages match the filter, leading Gmail to lump the rest of the conversation in with that positive match and archive the lot. Fingers crossed it'll work with fresh incoming messages, though -- I'll update this post when I confirm.