By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

Filtering your E-Mail

When I go through the contents of my U.S. mailbox at home, an automatic process kicks in. Once the magazines and catalogs are to one side, the task is to sort the rest of my mail in a categorical and hierarchical order, so that reading the mail becomes an easy and, sometimes equally automatic, procedure. The first pile is reserved for communications from family and friends. The second pile is for the very infrequent occasions when someone actually sends me money. The third is the pile of bills for which I have to send somebody money. The fourth pile contains recognizable mailings from businesses with which I have some sort of dealing. The fifth pile is reserved for mildly interesting junk mail that I might open and evaluate. The sixth pile is for the junk mail that will find its way to the recycling bin without so much as a peek at the contents. Of course, if piles one through five happen to be empty that day, reading mail is easy —- one toss and I’m done.

E-mail can sometimes need as much sorting as the traditional paper kind. If you are a frequent E-mail user like me, there is some mail that you want to notice and read right away. Some E-mail is best left for future examination, and some you wish you’d never received in the first place. Luckily, most E-mail programs have a mail filtering facility that helps you sort your E-mail. Unlike dealing with postal mail, E-mail filtering can sort your mail for you automatically, based upon your selected criteria, with no need for your manual intervention.

How Filters Work

There are a couple of different filtering methods used by E-mail programs. Some, like Novell’s GroupWise will actually place your mail in separate folders depending upon the criteria you select. Other programs, like Esys’ Simeon, will change the way messages are sorted and displayed within a mail folder. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, but in the end can be equally effective in helping you organize incoming mail.

The concept behind mail filtering is that you use some parameter of the E-mail header to determine where that particular piece of mail will be filed. The header is the part of the E-mail that contains the to and from address information, the E-mail subject line, and other information such as the date the E-mail was sent and delivered. For example, if you frequently receive mail from a person named Fred, you could filter Fred’s mail into a particular folder or group by telling your E-mail program to look for Fred’s address as part of the from address. If you wanted your replies to Fred to be placed with the incoming messages, you could tell your E-mail program to look for Fred’s address as the destination also.

Filters have a number of uses beyond just identifying mail from individuals. If you subscribe to E-mail mailing lists, filters can be useful for segregating your mailing list mail from the rest of your mail. If you frequently receive junk E-mail from a particular site or address, you can filter that mail to one location and throw it away with just one operation.

More Information about Filters

In Esys’ Simeon program (the student E-mail program at UNT), mail filters are called Message Groups. You can create a new Message Group by selecting "New/Message Group" from the programs File menu (the message group will be created in whatever folder you currently have selected, usually the Inbox). For information about setting up Simeon Message Groups see the applicable section in the Getting Started with Simeon document, available on the World Wide Web at:

http://simeon.acs.unt.edu/simeondoc/simeonstart.html#GROUPS

You can also read more about Message Groups in the Simeon users guides found on the Simeon Documentation Page (http://simeon.acs.unt.edu/simeondoc/) as PDF format files.

Novell’s GroupWise implements filters as part of its Rules facility. Consult the GroupWise Help file for more information about setting up a mail filtering rule.

A previous version of this column talked about mail filtering in Pegasus Mail and for UNIX-based mail systems. See the September/October 1994 issue of Benchmarks NewsJournal and find the Network Connections article to read more about mail filtering on those systems.

E-mail filters are one feature that should not be overlooked if you receive and send multiple messages a day. Filters can make the process of reading E-mail much easier and more efficient. With a little imagination and experimentation, you can have your E-mail sorted and ready to read as soon as you run your E-mail program.n