Gmail Filter Annoyances

I recently spent some time organizing my GMail inbox. For me, that mostly meant making sure every message was tagged with a label and archived. I like using the filters to automatically tag messages for me, so I just need to read and archive and I know it'll be saved in the right spot without me having to do as much work. I have a bazillion filters and for the most part I am happy with it. But the creating a filter process isn't as flexible as I think it could be.

1. You can't set up just one filter for messages sent to and recieved from a specific person.
I ran into this problem when I wanted to set up a filter for a particular teacher that sends many emails out, has several similar email addresses and I've had class with him more than once. I wanted to create one filter that all messages sent to and received from can be labeled and archived. But the way the boxes are set up, you can't get any type of OR option between two different boxes. This made me realize that google should have a master box like in their search. For example; I can use the search term 'to:jsmith OR from:jsmith' to view messages both to and from this person. But there is no way to set up a filter to catch the exact same messages, I would need to type jsmith into the 'to' box and then create another filter with jsmith in the 'from' box. If Google made an option with one text box that can be used like the search box then this problem can be remedied.

2. You can't set up a filter for a group.
This is kind of an odd problem, most likely not that necessary and I'm probably the only person with this issue, anyhow, I'm annoyed that you can't set up filters or search using a group from your contacts. Say I had a group in my contact list called 'family' which consisted of several contacts, (mom, dad, brother, other brother, aunt etc,). There is no way I could either search or make a filter for all emails that I sent to this group. I think this is because groups are converted to the list of contacts immediately before you even send or save the message. But Gmail has the list of contacts in the group, I think it would be helpful if they used that to search for all the contacts when the group is entered into the search box. So if I searched for 'to:family' it should translate that into 'to:mom to:dad to:brother ...'.

3. There is no simple option to view messages with no filters.
There IS a way to view messages without filters but if you have many filters like I do then it becomes more difficult. To view message with a certain label such as 'personal' then you would type into the search box 'label:personal'. By adding a minus sign before that like '-label:personal' it will bring up all the messages that do NOT have that label. So all you need is to string together ALL your labels with minus signs such as '-label:personal -label:facebook -label:classwork" and it will show all the messages without those labels. The problem comes when you have so many labels that it is a pain to type them all out. It's an annoying thing that Google should be able to easily fix. They just need to do it.