Administration of Eudora filters

The administration of message folders and filters is largely an individual issue because it depends on the specific email that you receive using Eudora. Below are some ideas for situations in which you may wish to set up mailboxes and corresponding filters.

Lists

A list server list is an enhanced mailing list and as such functions as a fully automated electronic discussion forum aimed at a particular topic. When you post a contribution to a list, the list server mails it to all subscribers on the list. Filters are particularly effective in this area, as list traffic can become quite overwhelming at times.

It is almost always a good idea to create a folder and a filter for any given list as soon as you have subscribed to it. When the list mail is automatically transferred to respective message folders, there is no need to deal with steadily increasing clutter in the standard inbox. And when list mail is placed in separate mailboxes, saving time sets in in yet another way as you are also likely to delete many of the messages without even opening them since the subject fields alone usually offer a hint of whether the mail is of any interest to you.

An often used method of configuring filters for lists is to enter part of the recipient address of the list mail as the Eudora filter match, which is the mechanism triggering the action of transferring the mail to the list folder. If list contributions for the list entitled Fun-L are sent to Fun-L@lists.berkeley.edu, then a To: filter of Fun-L@ is likely to catch by far most of the mail for the list and transfer it to message folder, whose name may be Fun-L.

When filtering list server lists, the To: header is often the preferred choice. The above additionally illustrates the matching action triggered by the match.

Other filters

If you are working on a project whose communication is based on email, it quickly pays off to create a separate folder (or several) along with a filter for it (or them). Some types of email may be organized based on the names of friends, co-workers and groups. Other types can be filtered depending on the time the mails are sent to you. Yet other filters rely on the priority of mails. The common key though is to create a new folder and a new filter whenever you feel that some email should not be read from your inbox.

Reading filtered mail

The default behavior of Eudora is to automatically open any mailbox when new mail arrives there, which serves as a practical reminder that you have unread messages. If this configuration has been changed or if you have closed the mailbox(es), Eudora's Mailbox menu underlines any mailbox name with unread messages on the Macintosh; in Windows, an envelope icon is added next to the mailbox.