Depending on what sort of hooks you have for filtering: Emails usually 
contain an In-Reply-To header, which is what mail readers use for 
threading. So you could say "hide every email from a given person, and 
every email that responds to an email from that person as well". It's 
not perfect, but it'd be pretty good.

On May 7, 2005, at 9:06 PM, Bertram Scharpf wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am Sonntag, 08. Mai 2005, 03:51:30 +0900 schrieb Ryan Davis:
>> The signal:noise ratio on this list is terrible. I'm taking a
>> vacation from it. Please, David Black, James Britt, or someone else
>> trusted, email me when this nonsense is over... or at least better.
>
> Too bad that scanning mail bodies for the last name doesn't
> suffice. Does anybody know of a better filter criterion? For
> the present I have to delete everything containing even the
> forename.
>
> Bertram
>
>
> -- 
> Bertram Scharpf
> Stuttgart, Deutschland/Germany
> http://www.bertram-scharpf.de
>
>

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/