I get a lot of mails sent to me from the Debian bug tracking system. Some of these are a result of people reporting bugs against the packages I maintain.

Other mails are relating to bugs I report against other packages.

After a while all this mail gets out of hand. So for the past few weeks I've been making sure I file them away carefully in my mailboxes.

I've come up with the organisation:

Mail/
     debian/
            packages/
                     apache2
                     apachetop
                     ...
                     ...
                     wakeonlan
                     xen-tools

So one mailbox per package, all stored beneath ~/Mail/debian/packages - where I can easily find things relating to that package.

Now that I'm happy with that I've started to automate it. The following procmail rule does the job:

:0
* !^X-Debian-PR-Package: \/[-a-zA-Z0-9]+
* !^X-Debian-PR-Source: \/[-a-zA-Z0-9]+
* !^X-PTS-Package: \/[-a-zA-Z0-9]+
* !^X-Testing-Watch-Package: \/[-a-zA-Z0-9]+
{ }
:0 E
debian/packages/$MATCH

Here we use "$MATCH" to match against magical headers that the bug tracking system inserts into the mail(s) it sends out. This technique was previously covered in an article about filtering Debian mailing lists with procmail,