Hi jbelk,
Let me try my hand at answering some of your questions:
Tuesday, September 19, 2000, 23:28:29, you wrote:
<snip>
j> Please think simple and easy. I only have three kinds of email: 1)
j> email from people I know. 2) People I don't know. 3) People I don't
j> want to know.
j> 1) Those I know I separate into folders, Jokes, Patent info, etc.. Some
j> of these folders receive mail from one person with one email all the
j> way to one box that receives mail from nearly 50 people using a total
j> of 150 or so return addresses.
Step 1: set up your folders. These can be nested if you like (e.g., I
put all my separate mailing list folders under my Subscriptions
folder). You can set up new folders as needed from within the Sorting
Office if you prefer.
Step 2: set up your filters. The first filters you should set up
should correspond to your category 1), that is to say, email from
people you know. The way I think about the order of my filters is
this: the filters with the most unique criteria go to the top of the
list. That way there's less chance of mail being misfiled, since The
Bat! puts new email through the filters in order. The TUBDL filter is
a good example; here's how I've set mine up:
Name: TUBDL filter
Move Messages to Folder: Subscriptions\TUBDL
String Location Present
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Recipient Yes
You should be able to configure most mailing lists in a similar
fashion.
Now let's say that you want to put several mailing lists into a single
folder -- maybe you need more than one laugh a day, so you've
subscribed to multiple humor lists. One easy way of filtering all
your joke email to a single folder is to first set up a filter along
the lines of the TUBDL example above. Then you can add additional
addresses after the first one by putting | in between the addresses.
Or, if you prefer, you can click on the Alternatives tab, then Add
Set. The Alternatives tab allows you to list alternative cases which
should each trigger the same filtering action (in this case, moving
the new mail to the Jokes folder). Any mail that corresponds to any
*one* of the sets will be filtered to the Jokes folder.
Now let's say that you have a lot of different people contacting you
about Patent info, and they aren't members of a mailing list, just
individual contacts. One way of doing this would be to set up the
following filter:
Name: Patent Info
Move Messages to Folder: Patent Info
String Location Present
<email address> Sender Yes
where <email address> is the email address (or even just the username)
of the person whose mail you want to filter to the Patent Info folder.
But what if this person *also* contacts you about other things, and
you only want emails related to patent info to go into this folder?
Simple, if all of those emails contain the word "patent." Click on
"Add" and a new string field will pop up right underneath the first
one. For this new string you might go with something like:
String Location Present
patent anywhere yes
With those two strings together, *both* criteria (<email> & "patent")
will have to be present in order for the filter to move the new
message into the Patent folder. You could even have multiple email
addresses in the first string, using the | operator.
Or, instead of making the patent-anywhere-yes string be a part of the
same set as the <email> string, you could set the "patent" string up
as an Alternative. The advantage to this choice is that new people
could contact you about patents and have their email filtered to the
proper folder even if you do not add their specific email address to
the first filter string. But again, this only works so long as the
word "patent" actually appears in the mail somewhere.
j> 2) These are infrequently people in group one using still another
j> email address, but more often are people or companies contacting me for
j> business or personal stuff. A fair amount of spam gets here by
j> spam bot harvesting from usenet post and unsecure email (Congress is the
j> worst). From this folder I drag and drop into folders like Keep,
j> Information, Answer Later, etc.
Well, if you want to use filtering for this, you'll have to figure out
what keywords are most likely to differentiate between email you do
want to read from people you don't know, and spam. Filters are only as
reliable as the keywords and rules you set up to guide them. For the
first week or two after you create your new filters, it's probably a
good idea to spend a little extra time skimming through your folders
to see what (if anything) is getting misfiled, and why. If your
filters are too narrowly defined, you may end up putting some
important mail in the spam folder by accident, and if your filters are
too vague, well, you'll be reading a lot of junk. If your filters are
in an inappropriate order (let's say the first filter is needlessly
vague), you'll also have problems, because the default is to *not*
continue putting email through filters once it has found a match. As I
said above, you'd probably do best to put your most narrowly defined
filters at the top of your filter list, so the mail that's easiest to
recognize gets taken care of right away. It'll probably take some
tweaking before you get it right.
j> 3) These are spam and obscure newsletters seldom read and sometimes
j> something good that got caught by a filter. Anything seen to be spam
j> is promoted to "Delete from server", which I see as the ultimate
j> filter. I don't want to see it ever again. Many times these are whole
j> domains.
Be careful with this. If you have "Delete from server" as an Incoming
mail filter action, the mail will NOT appear in any of your mail
folders. In other words, the mail will get deleted before you ever
get a chance to read it. (I think. At least, that's what seemed to
happen when I tried it! ) If you're new to configuring filters, this
is not a wise action to select. Instead, create a "spam" folder, and
have the correlating filter come up last in your Incoming mail filter
list -- the catchall for anything that the computer doesn't otherwise
know what to do with. Save "Delete from server" for a later point in
time, when you can trust that you've configured your filters properly.
j> That's all I want to do. Sort through the mail just exactly like I do
j> it with snail mail. I throw away the junk without opening it. I don't
j> care how many gazillion dollars I've already won or how much toilet
j> paper cost.
<snip>
j> The third batch is opened while standing over the trash can...most of
j> it goes in. When I recognize a certain signal of snail spam (Is that cheap
escargot?)
j> like an odd lack of identifying address or postmark, it is soon promoted
j> to being thrown away in the first sorting.
Sure, but it's probably taken years of (involuntary) practice to
perfect your recognition of paper junk mail. What you have to do is
figure out what the signs are that will allow your computer to make
the same sorts of distinctions between mail you want to read and mail
you don't. It may take a little trial and error, but it's worth it!
Good luck, and I hope this helps,
Havivah
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