Email Filters Page Help

• Introduction to Email Filters
• Should you use these filters?
• -- If you use a personal computer email application
• -- If you want to continue using POP
• ACCC CUSTOMIZABLE email filters
• ANTI-SPAM Email Filters
• ATTACHMENT email filter
• VACATION Auto-Reply Filter
• Editing, Viewing, and Shuffling Existing Filters

The Email Filters Page (which requires logging in with Bluestem) gives you an easy way of creating and managing your email filters.

Email filters are sets of rules that determine what happens to incoming messages. Using these filters you can automatically take some action on incoming mail, whether it is sorting mail from Harry into the 'harry' folder, or automatically replying to mail while you're on vacation. You will probably want to use email filtering if you receive a lot of messages.

There are four different types of filters; the details of each are given below.

• The Customizable Mail Filters are generic and will be helpful if you want to separate personal from business- or school-related mail, or just want to have an easy way of organizing your mail based on a variety of criteria that you can specify.
  
  
• The Vacation Auto-Reply Filter can be used to automatically reply to messages sent to you while you are away from your email access.
  
  
• The Anti-Spam Filter is a ready-made filter that you can use to filter out mass junk emailings (known as "spam").
  
  
• The Attachments Filter can be used to filter out all or a subset of attachments, which you may find useful to contain viruses or to simply sort attachments for later downloading. .

You may already be familiar with filtering mechanisms that come with some email applications. For example, Eudora allows you to define a set of customizable filters. But the filters you create here -- server filters -- are a bit different from those you create in Eudora or other local email clients -- local filters.

Local filters, including all Eudora filters, aren't applied to new incoming email until you check it; in other words, when your email application connects to the mail server (e.g., tigger, mailserv, or icarus) looking for any new incoming email that you might have.

The incoming email filters generated by this utility, however, are server filters, which filter your new incoming email as soon as it arrives on the server, regardless of whether you have checked your email or not. However, since these filters only reside on the server, they are not able to sort messages into your local email folders on your PC; they can only sort messages into folders that reside on the server (in your account).

This means that these server filters are ideal if you are using an email application that directly accesses the mail directly on the server (usually via the IMAP protocol). Such clients include Pine and Webmail.

If you using a local email application (e.g., Eudora, Outlook, etc) then the situation is slightly more nuanced. If you are not using one of these programs, you can simply skip to the next section and start setting up your filters.

Local email applications (Eudora, Outlook, etc) allow you to use one of two protocols for checking your email: IMAP or POP. You can read more about the differences the October 1998 Issue of the A3C Connection. It will suffice our purposes to say that IMAP can access all your email folders -- both folders that you might have on the server and ones that you keep locally on your personal computer -- while POP simply downloads all the mail from your inbox in one shot and can access only local email folders.

Thus, if your email application is configured (see the article above) to use IMAP, then you can use the filters generated by this utility to move incoming email into different folders on the server and access all the folders to which email was sorted through your email application.

If you are not sure whether you're using IMAP or POP, then you're probably using the usual default protocol POP. If you want to make full use of these filters, you'll need to switch over to IMAP (and there are other good reasons to switch as well). This is usually just a matter of re-configuring your email application.

The instructions on setting Eudora for Windows or Mac up to use IMAP are in Configuring Eudora for IMAP. If you are using some other mail application, this configuration page will give you the necessary information to configure your application, but you'll have to track down the corresponding menus.

If, however, you are using POP and want to continue to do so, or if you would like to keep using your local email filters in conjunction with these filters, you can still do so, albeit it to a more limited degree. Some of the filters below give you an option called "Tag-only". This option means that the message is not filtered into another folder - instead a header-tag is inserted into the top of the message with the name: X-UICClass: UICClass something
where 'something' depends on which filter you're using.

You can then use your local filtering system to look for the matching tag regardless of whether you're using POP or IMAP. Then if you're local filter finds a match, it can some action as specified by your application. In other words, you can use these filters to set the criterion for filtering, and your local filter to actually carry out the filtering.

The concept is the same for all the ACCC CUSTOMIZABLE filters: The first section asks you to specify the criteria by which the mail will be filtered. The second section asks you what to do with the email if the criteria in the first section match. Most of the filters work exactly as you'd expect -- you can specify actions based on who sent the message, what's in the subject of the message, what type of message, and so on. There are, however, some footnotes that you may find useful.

If you select the filter to look for something in the "TO" field, that also includes the other common recipient field called CC (carbon copy). For example, the rule specified as such:

Activate filter if the TO: field of the incoming email contains this: john@company.com

will work if the message is addressed directly to john@company.com or if john@company.com is included in the CC: field.

Towards the bottom of the "Set Action" section of the filters page, you will see a checkbox with this text next to it:

Pass a copy of this email onto the filters that follow it. If none of the following filters match this email, or there are no filters following this one, then checking this box will place a copy of the email into your default Inbox as well as doing the afore-checked action.

This is handy because, once a message passes through a filter and an action is performed on it, the message will not be put through any filters that follow it unless the box above is checked. For example, if you want to send a copy of any messages sent by john@company.com to a different address (say, myhome@network.net), you can keep a copy of the message on your UIC account (or run it through further filters) by checking the Pass a copy of this email box.

Forwarding all mail to another address is easy using this filters page; all you have to do is to set up the criteria (leave it blank, and it will match every message that comes to your account), then click on the little circle in front of:

Forward the email to these addresses

and enter the address(es) to which you want the message(s) forwarded. You can specify multiple addresses by separating them with a comma.

Introduction

This filter is to deal with cumbersome and sometimes dangerous attachments. An attachment is usually a file that is 'attached' to an email, usually used when the format of the file is not text. For example, a Microsoft Word document, a Spreadsheet, or a program that is executed.

There are two main problems with attachments. They can be very large and thus fill up available inbox space, and they may therefore be difficult to download. The are also the chief means through which viruses are spread on the internet. If an attachment is received and executed, it could contain malicious contents that damage the computer and spread out to other computers.

This filter may ease in dealing with attachments, but is not a replacement for common sense and precaution when dealing with attachments. You should never open an attachment from anyone, even a friend or colleague, unless that person had told you, in a separate email what the attachment is. Viruses commonly spread through email addresses books, so it's likely that, if your PC were to become infected, it would be from someone you know!

For more on such precautions, see the article on Email Worms in the April/May/June 2000 issue of the AC3 Connection.

Filling out the Attachment filter:

You may chose between filtering out all attachments that come it, no matter what types of files they contain. This is simpler than designating certain types, but you may also inadvertently filter out mail with innocent text attachments.

You can also choose to designate which types of attachments to filter out, which gives you more control over the filter. Some of the common file types have been selected for you - these types are those most likely cause problems if executed accidentally, or those that actually execute by themselves one you open your mail, without you even clicking on the attachment itself.

Filling out the Attachment filter - Set action:

There are two choices as to what should be done with attachments once detected. What you choose depends mostly on which email application you use to read your email, for details see the section above called Should you use these filters?.

In either case, the header tag called "X-UICClass: UICClass Attachment " will be inserted into the headers of the message in question. But in the second case the message will also be sorted into a folder of your choice. and the message will NOT be passed on to subsequent filters.

Going on vacation? or coming back from one?

This function will help you setup a Vacation email file. That means, when someone sends you a note while you're gone, your mail will be saved and an automatic reply of your choice will be sent back to the sender. The program is also smart enough to send only one message per week to the sender, and it won't send any mail to LISTSERV or email daemons, etc.

You can use this function to create or edit the reply message, and to to activate or deactivate your vacation messages.

Additionally, you can set an optional date on which your vacation auto-reply automatically turns itself off. That way, you needn't remember to come back to this page to deactivate it.

Finally, it will optionally also let you specify if you want the filter to remove large attachments that might plug up your email account in your absence.

For more information, see Sending Email Vacation Auto-Replies.

Once you set up your filters, you can still add more filters, or delete them at will, or even change the order in which they run (the default is the order in which they are created).

Note that the order of the filters can be crucial to how mail is filtered. If you are unaware how the filter interact with each other, you may see unexpected results.

In the list of your filters, and especially with the specialty ready-made filters, you will see recommendations as to where the filters should be in relation to other filters, but these are not absolute - you should place them in whichever order you consider to be most useful.

For example, you may have a filter that says that all mail from joe@yahoo.com goes into your "joe" folder. Then you may have a second filter that says that all mail with the Subject of "Green Cows" goes into your "cattle" folder.

That's fine, but what happens if joe@yahoo.com happens to write you a message about Green Cows? If the 'joe' filter was first, then it will go into the joe folder and not into the cattle folder as specified (unless you check the box that says to pass on mail to the next filter). If your Subject filter was first however, then the reverse would be the case.

The case above is illustrative, but probably rare. But if you use the attachment or anti-spam filters, you're likely to see more overlap. You may, for example, receive spam mail that has an attachment, so what would happen to it would depend on which filter was first in line.