7.6 Email filters

7.6.1 Filtering email

7.6.2 Setting up filters

7.6.3 Applying filters

7.6.4 Ordering filters

7.6.5 Editing and deleting filters

7.6.1 Filtering email

Filters allow you to transfer incoming messages automatically into the appropriate folder when they are received. This can be particularly useful in helping you to share email with colleagues. You could filter all email received from a specified individual or organisation into a mail folder which is shared with a group of your colleagues.

Filters can either be set up on your Personal Email Area - to apply to all your mailboxes by default - or they can be set up on specific mailboxes.

7.6.2 Setting up filters

To add a new filter, click on  View/Change  |  Edit Filters  in your Personal Email Area or in a specific mailbox and then click on  View/Change  |   Add Filter  . This will bring up a form like the one shown in Figure 7.6-1. Give the filter a name and choose whether to copy the original message or to move it when it is filtered. Next, select where the filtered message should be put, by selecting a mailbox or mail folder from the drop-down list, or specify a new mail folder (or folder) to be created with the given name. Next, enter the rule which will decide which email messages the filter should act on (e.g. "was sent by" or "has a subject containing") and type the pattern to be matched into the box below. (For instance, this could be a specific user name, the domain name of an entire company, the name of a project etc.) You can specify a combined rule by joining criteria together - click on "More". This will display another rule which you can combine with the first one as specified.

Finally, click on "Done" to set up the filter.

Note that if you have a number of filters set up, you can choose the order in which they should be applied - see section 7.6.4.

Figure 7.6-1: Adding a mail filter.

Note 1

When setting up a new filter, you will be given the choice to create a new mail folder or a new folder to contain the filtered objects. It is recommended that you filter email messages into a mail folder and attachments into an ordinary folder. Extracting email attachments automatically from incoming email messages (see section 7.5.5) uses this mechanism.

Note 2

If you move a mailbox out of the Personal email area, the only filters which will apply to it will be the locally defined ones.

7.6.3 Applying filters

By default, all the filters which you have defined in your Personal Email Area are inherited by all the mailboxes it contains, i.e. they apply to all the mailboxes contained in your Personal Email Area. If you do not wish all of these filters to be applied or you wish to alter the order in which the filters are applied, you should go into the mailbox and click on   View/Change  |  Edit Filters  . This will present you with a view of the mail filters which apply to this mailbox - see Figure 7.6-2. The top half of this page contains locally defined filters and the lower half contains those inherited from the Personal Email Area.

Locally defined filters will take precedence over inherited ones. You can select which of the inherited filters you wish to be applied to this mailbox by clicking on the "Select filters" button. This will automatically stop the inherited filters from being applied and will redisplay the Mailbox Filters view with additional buttons to allow you to select which inherited filters to apply. To reapply them all, click on "Use all filters". Alternatively select specific ones and click on "Add selected" to apply these to the current mailbox.

Filters are applied whenever you click   View/Change  |  Get New Mail  for the mailbox. You can also force filters to be applied on the existing mailbox contents - for instance, if you have just set up a new filter - by clicking on   View/Change  |  Filter Current Folder  in a mailbox or mail folder.

Figure 7.6-2: View of mail filters.

7.6.4 Ordering filters

If you have a number of filters set up, you can choose the order of precedence for them. Filters can only be ordered within a Filter Group - usually a related group of filters which will be applied to all mail on a particular subject or of a particular type.

To set up a Filter Group, click on  View/Change  |  Add Mail Filter Group  in the Filters view. This allows you to assign a name to the new group and then select which existing filters belong to this group. You can order the filters in a group by clicking on  View/Change  |  Order Filters  . As it is best for the most specialised filter to act first, this should be moved to the top of the list by selecting it and clicking "Move To Top". The order of all the filters in the list can be adjusted in this way.

For each message, the filters will be applied in order. You can specify on any filter that, if the message matches the filter's criteria, no further filtering should take place on that message. Filtering of this message will then cease and the next message will be dealt with.

7.6.5 Editing and deleting filters

In the Filters view , filters may be selected and then edited to allow any of the original filter settings to be modified or additional criteria added. The Filters view can be accessed from  View/Change  |  Edit Filters  for either the Personal Email Area or a specific mailbox depending on where the filters apply.

Filters may be removed from a particular Filter Group by selecting them in turn and clicking on "Remove filter from group".

Similarly, filters may be selected and then deleted from the Filters view.