We ended last time talking about organizing email within a dedicated email application like Outlook Express or Eudora. I posed the riveting question, “can you get incoming emails to organize themselves?” The answer? Of course, you can, through the clever use of rules (sometimes called filters).

Here’s how rules work. You’ve probably noticed that each email you receive has, at the beginning of the text, a line for “From”, “Date”, “To”, and “Subject”. This simple “header” information tells you who sent the email, the date and time it was sent, who it was sent to (you), and the subject assigned to the email by the sender. This information is an abridged version of the email’s lengthy full header. The full header also contains a lot of information you don’t usually care about, like the email’s path through the internet, the software used by the originator, and so forth.
With rules, you can tell your email application to perform a variety of actions on each email as it comes in. Or, you can apply the rules and filters to emails you’ve already received.

Setting up rules uses “IF-THEN” logic. For example, IF an email comes from a particular address, THEN put it into a specified mailbox. More advanced email applications can look at more information in the header, and execute actions like deleting, changing message colors in lists, saving attachments, printing, automatically addressing replies, adding senders to your Address Book, etc. Plus, you can have the application perform more than one action on each email.

Now, what about all that junk email you receive? You could spend the time to create rules for each address you receive junk email from, or for a subject line, like “Viagra”, to send that email to a Junk mailbox, or even delete it, without you ever having to read it. However, junk email spammers use many ever-changing addresses and subject lines to thwart such filtering schemes.

To combat junk email spammers, many email applications are employing a kind of automatic filter system that actually “learns” what is junk and what is not. When you receive junk email and tell the application it’s junk, the application analyzes the header and message contents. The next time a similar email is delivered to you, the application categorizes it as junk, and disposes of it per your wishes.

Many Internet Service Providers (ISP) also employ sophisticated junk email filters on their servers. In the event spam gets through their filters, they provide an “abuse hotline” email address to which you can send the header information from the offending email. They then apply that information to their filtering system. Taking a minute or two to do this can cut down on the amount of junk you and others using your ISP receive.

Another great use for rules is to organize email coming in from Mailing Lists you may subscribe to. A Mailing List is a way for people with common interests to communicate with each other through email. When you send an email to the list address, it is automatically sent to everyone on the list. Everyone’s email is sent to everyone else on the list, so you can see the volume of email can escalate rapidly. Applying a rule to incoming Mailing List emails can keep this volume out of your In Box, tucked away for you to read at your leisure.

Speaking of volumes of email, we all have those exasperating special friends who send us every joke they receive, and others that send us entire songs and photo albums via email. Next time we’ll talk about email etiquette.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski