And there are no other students at any college other than CS students? I'm not sure why a biologist or a literature student would need to be au fait with Google's admittedly fairly unfriendly email management setup.

Digital literacy is important to every field. Email filters are not some arcane computer science concept, they are the modern equivalent of filing physical mail into the right folder/pidgeon hole/inbox/whatever.

Biology is a great example because of just how important digital record management is to experimentation in the field.

I don't think you've seen many biology field data sets.

All biology folks I'm interacting with are juggling excel sheets all day.

Many relative to the total set, no. But enough to know writing it down isn’t going to cut it. Most datasets I’ve seen are xls, hdfs or csvs nested many directories deep. Not exactly for those who can’t manage an email filter. Without getting into the processing of it either

You can store Perl in any file format.

1. This was a response to a CS professor, so specific to CS students.

2. Yes, configuring gmail filters should be doable for anybody with a university degree. It's really not hard.