Email filtering links

Many mail clients (and/or mail delivery systems) allow you to automatically filter your mail based on various criteria. This page (created at the request of the CSAIL Online Working Group particularly to help people filter their csail-local mail) points at documentation for how to do this in various mail clients, or at delivery time in CSAIL’s mail infrastructure.

A note on server- vs. client-side filtering

Server-side filtering (e.g. with CSAIL’s IMAP server, Microsoft Exchange, or Gmail) is fairly safe and generally not too confusing. It just requires getting the filter rules correct.

However, if you have a mail client do this – the software you use to read your mail on your own personal machine – it can be very confusing, and in the worst case can make some of your email inaccessible. Most people use more than one machine to read their mail. If you use Thunderbird on your CSAIL Ubuntu machine in Stata, Outlook on your Windows machine at home, and a mail client on your phone when out and about, the filtering rules that get applied to any given message will depend on which machine happens to check your mail first. In the worst case, you might accidentally configure your home machine to filter into a folder on your local hard drive at home, and then you won’t be able to get at any of that email from your phone or your work computer.

(A safer alternative for some email clients is saved searches, which let you treat a particular search as if it were a separate folder, but without actually moving your messages around on your mail server, or potentially removing them from the mail server.)

Server-side filtering on CSAIL’s IMAP server

If your mail is delivered to CSAIL’s IMAP server and you read it there, then you can set up filters on the IMAP server itself. To do that, use CSAIL’s webmail server. Simply choose “Mail ▾” > “Filters” from the menu (at the top, next to where it says"horde Groupware 5.2.2”).

Unfortunately, we don’t yet have good documentation for this. However CSAIL is one of many sites that use this particular webmail software (called GNU Horde), and some other sites have documentation for it (although the links will go to their webmail servers, not ours):

• inmotion hosting has a quick intro
• codesteps.com also has a quick overview

We hope to put together (or find and link to) better documentation at some point.

Setting up filters for various mail clients

Unfortunately, mail client filtering tools are often poorly documented. If you find better documentation for any of these tools, please let TIG know. Please include the URL to this page so we know what your suggested addition is about.)

• Thunderbird (but Thunderbird’s saved search facility is likely to be a better choice, as explained above)
• Outlook or https://kb.intermedia.net/Article/1283 (the latter also describes setting up filters using Outlook Web Access)
• Gmail — this describes setting up rules that run on Google’s mail servers as your mail is delivered there, so it’s not subject to the above warning about client-side filtering
• Apple Mail
• iPads and iPhones don’t support running filters on the device itself, but if you use iCloud Mail, you can do it on iCloud, on Apple’s mail servers. (If you use iOS Mail on an iPhone to talk to CSAIL’s IMAP server or IS&T’s Exchange server, then you can set up filters on the server and then get at the various folders your mail filters deliver into on your phone.)