Email Filters and the Email Tools Page

Do you receive loads of lively email messages each day from chess-l@nic.surfnet.nl but you'd like to file them away in a special email folder to read when you get home from work? Perhaps you've had it with advertisements from pet_turtles@example.com, and you'd like all email from them to be automatically deleted. Or maybe you'd like everyone who sends you a message while you're at that conference next week to get an automatic reply telling them you'll get back to them when you return from your Caribbean cruise. (One can dream.)

Email filters can do all of this, and much more, and setting them up is now easy using the ACCC's Web Email Tools Utility, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/accc/mailtools
There you will find links to several email tools, including two that you can use to create filters to automatically process your incoming email.

• What Makes Mailtools Filters Different?
• How to Set Up Mailtools Filters
• Getting Started: Email Tools Web Page
• Vacation Reply Messages
• Other Mailtools Filters
• -- Antispam Filter
• -- Attachment Filter
• -- Customizable Filters
• The Tale of Ima Historian

The filters you create using our Mailtools Web utility, which we'll call Mailtools filters, are different from the email filters that you create and use in Eudora or other local email clients, which we'll call local filters. There are two important and related differences: (1) Mailtools filters are only applied to new incoming email, whereas you can apply local filters to any email, new or old, incoming or outgoing; and (2) when Mailtools filters are used to sort messages into mailboxes, they can only put them into mailboxes on the server. Both of these differences are direct consequences of where the filters are kept:

Local filters reside on your personal computer; therefore local filters can't be applied to any incoming message until you download it (or at least its headers), that is, after you start your email program and it checks your mail for you. This is why a local email filter won't work to send automatic replies to the new incoming email you receive while you're away from the office -- your local filter won't see any of your new mail until you come back and check your email. By then, it'll be too late.

Mailtools email filters, however, reside on an ACCC email server -- icarus, mailserv, and tigger -- and they act on new incoming email as soon as it arrives on the server, before it even reaches your Inbox. That makes them ideal for automatic vacation replies. But there's a drawback too. Because Mailtools filters live on the server, they can only sort incoming messages into email mailboxes that also live on the server. They can't sort messages into any local email mailboxes that you keep on your personal computer -- you'll need a local email filter to do that. Nor can they do anything to outgoing email or to incoming email after it arrives in your Inbox or another mailbox on the server.

Whether this restriction of Mailtools email filters to move new incoming email only into mailboxes on the server will be a problem for you or not depends on how you read your email.

Two of the ACCC-supported email applications --WebMail and pine -- are server-based; they always and only work with mailboxes that you keep on the server. Thus Mailtools' server-based filters are perfect for them.

Eudora and other local email applications can also manage email in mailboxes on the server, as long as you have configured them to use the IMAP protocol instead of the POP protocol to manage your email. For our purposes, the important difference between IMAP and POP is that IMAP allows your email program to access all your email mailboxes, both the mailboxes that you keep locally on your personal computer and the mailboxes that you have on the server, while POP simply downloads all the mail from your Inbox in one shot and can only access local email mailboxes, the ones you have on your personal computer.

The Email Tools Web page is at: https://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap-auth/bin/mail_filters
Or you can go to the ACCC home page, http://www.accc.uic.edu/, click the Email button, then select Email - Vacation Replies or Email Filters.

Login using your ACCC netid and password, select your email server if necessary, and you will be directed to a Web interface that allows you to easily set up an automatic reply to new incoming mail.

1. Step 1: Vacation Message
   1. Type the message that you want to send in the box in Step 1, then click Save Changes.
   2. When you receive Mailtools' reply, click Return to the previous configuration page to verify the results., and make sure the message is correct.
      
      
2. Step 2: Activate or Deactivate the Vacation Program.
   1. Click activate vacation email.
   2. When you receive Mailtools' reply, click Return to the previous configuration page to verify the results.
   3. Go on to Step 3 after you receive the confirmation email message in your Inbox.
      
      
3. Step 3: Set the date on which you want your vacation replies to end. You don't have to do this, but if you don't, you will have to remember to go back to Mailtools when you get back to turn your vacation autoreply off.
   1. Select the month, day, and year that you want the vacation message turned off.
   2. Click Set Deactivate Date.
   3. Click the logout here link at the top of the page.

For all other Mailtools filters, on the Email Tools Web page, After you login, select your email server if necessary, and you will be presented with the Email Filters Utility Page, which provides a number of different filtering options.

The ready-made antispam filter can be activated to have spam automatically sorted out of your Inbox; see Canned Spam Filters for more on this one.

There is also a ready-made filter for messages with attachments. Like the antispam filter, you can use it to sort email with attachments out of your Inbox or just to identify messages that have attachments. Turning the attachment filter on is just a matter of selecting whether you want to sort all attachments or just some (and selecting the ones you want from a list of extension types), and then selecting either File matching messages into a folder: or to tag them, Tag only:. (You can use the Tag only: action combined with a local filter to move selected messages into a local mailbox, which is explained in Canned Spam Filters.)

Sorting out all messages with attachments makes it much less likely that you'll open one accidentally, and it also makes them a lot easier to find. Even if you don't have much other mail, a large attachment or two can make you go over your email quota.

And we might develop more of these ready-made filters as the need arises.

Also, there's help to be had from a link on this page; click the Help page in a new window link at the top of the Email Filters Utility Page before you start working with your Mailtools filters.

The most versatile of the Mailtools filters are the customizable filters. You can use these filters to automatically file messages into mailboxes (on the server only, remember, for use with WebMail, pine, or a personal computer email program set up to use IMAP), forward mail to other locations, or delete messages based on the criteria you specify. You'll naturally want to exercise some caution before choosing to delete a message though -- if you accidentally make the criteria of a delete filter too broad, you could lose email that you really wanted to see. It's better to simply sort it into another mailbox and delete it by hand occasionally, once you're sure it's all junk.

For each filter you must specify two things.

• The criteria used to select a message, based on whom it's from, whom it's addressed to, or what's in its subject line.
• The action that should be done to the messages that match the criteria.

When selecting the action, first you choose one of:

• File the message into a folder (the Mailtools utility calls mailboxes folders), either an existing one or a new one created for the filter, or
• Forward the message to other email address(es), or
• Delete the message.

And then, as a separate choice, you choose whether to pass a copy of the message onto the filters that follow it and perhaps, eventually, into your Inbox. Select this, for example, if you want to forward the message to another address and to keep a copy for yourself.

The venturesome story of Ima Historian may help illustrate the usefulness of Mailtools customizable filters. Ima was subscribed to the email discussion list roman_history@example.com. But as you can imagine, the great interest in the list meant that there were simply too many messages coming in each day, which made it difficult and time consuming for Ima to sort through it to find her personal and more urgent messages.

So Ima decided to create a Mailtools filter to sort the mail from the list into her Rome mailbox, for leisure reading at home each night. For this she went to the Email Tools page, selected her email server machine and Set up Filters, clicked continue, and logged in to reach the Email Filters Utility Page.

On that page, she clicked Create a new customizable mail filter. Then, in the Set criterion 1 box, she changed the options to read as follows: Activate filter if the from: field of the incoming email contains this: roman_history@example.com

She skipped the second criteria and jumped down to the Set Action section and selected File this message into a folder:. Since she had not yet created an Rome folder, she selected create and use new folder: and typed Rome in the box beside it. Because that was all she wanted done with these messages, she did not select the option to pass them on to the filters that follow it. After clicking Create new Email filter, all her new mail from the list was sorted into her Rome folder, and she was able to enjoy discussions on the conquests of Gaul in peace.

But the euphoria wore off quickly. Ima was also involved in a vehement email discussion on the use of Latin verbs in the Roman Senate, which was taking place on that same roman_history list. But this particular topic, being her specialty, was of much greater interest to her, so she needed to sort it out for more immediate attention.

So Ima created a second filter. This time she filled out the Set criterion 1 options just as before, but then she combined it with a second criterion. In the section called How should criterion 1 and criterion 2 be combined?, she selected and. Then, in Set criterion 2, she changed the options so that it read as follows: Activate filter if the subject: field of the incoming mail contains this: latin verbs

Then, in the Set Action section, she choose to file these messages into a new folder called verbage just has she had done with Rome before.

But that evening, Ima was disappointed. In addition to her train home being late, she noticed that all of her mail from the roman_history list continued to be sorted into her Rome folder, regardless of whether the subject line contained "Latin verbs." But both of her filters were set up correctly -- what had gone wrong?

Well, Rome wasn't built in a day. One thing to remember when creating email filters is that they are applied in the order that they're listed. In this case, as Ima's mail was received, each message was first compared to her first rule, and any mail from the roman_history list was put in her Rome mailbox.

Thus, all the mail from the roman_history list was sorted by the first rule and never made it to the second rule at all. Since her second rule was more specific than her first rule, it would have worked as planned had she created the second rule first.

Having realized this, Ima went back to the Web page to fix her error. She scrolled down to the section called View, delete, or shuffle existing filters, where the two filters she had made before were listed in the order she created them. In the box for the second filter, she clicked the button Shuffle this filter up one position. That changed the order of the two filters so Ima was now happy.

1. If mail was from roman_history and about "Latin verbs," it went into her verbage folder.
2. If any remaining mail was from the roman_history list, it went into her Rome folder.
3. All remaining messages were filed in her Inbox.

Ima Historian is simply one example of a happy customer. If, like Ima, you receive an abundance of email and you're tired of sorting through it all for the important messages, then you could certainly put these filters to good use. But, while Ima's case was typical, there is much more you can do with the Mailtools email filters, which is explained on the page itself or its help page. Give it a try! You know the old saying, when in Rome...

Comments are welcome; please send them
to Joshua Frigerio, joshua@uic.edu