Manfred Kuechler


Using Filters in Eudora -- to fight spam and to manage your mail more efficiently


Version:  19 December 2003


Eudora (current version 5.2.1) is an e-mail program ("client") to manage your e-mail for which Hunter has a site license covering unlimited home and office use by faculty and staff.  If you want to install/update to the current version of Eudora contact Frank Lopez at ICIT. For reason not apparent to me, the ICIT web page offers download links for obsolete versions only.  ICIT does offer guides to the current software version  on its web site. These guides, however, are simply parts of the official Eudora manual, and not everyone is good at using official software manuals. This advice page assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of Eudora., it is not a Eudora primer for the novice.
 
I have two questions repeatedly over the last few months -- actually,  I have heard the first one for quite some time: Missing messages. Let me start with the second question. Many faculty use Eudora both at home and at the office, and many have Eudora so that all messages are "left on the server" when retrieved from  one location (say office) and are automatically deleted when retrieved from the other (say home). In theory,  all messages should be available at  the "main" location. But several colleagues claim that this does not work 100%.  I have not had an opportunity to investigate one of these cases in detail, but my best guess (based on what these colleagues told me) is that they let their Eudora inbox grow too large.  It is important to keep the Eudora inbox as small as possible, e.g., by moving incoming messages to other folders. The reason is that the inbox -- in contrast to other folders -- is loaded into memory  by default, so a large inbox consumes a lot "system resources" (which is particular relevant if you run an older Windows operating system like Win98/Me), and, as a consequence, Eudora may behave erratically not executing certain tasks properly, certain support files (like a spool file which keeps track of which messages have already been downloaded from a particular server) may get compromised, etc.  So, this page addresses the issue of keeping your Eudora inbox small by use of filters.

Spam. I don't want to go into all the details here again, many have been on hunter-l and relevant postings are still available via the web archive for hunter-l. Though I have heard good things about some spam fighting programs/utilities, I am still rather reluctant to let someone else decide which of my mail is spam. I rather do the sorting myself. And this is  not enormous chore  thanks to the use of filters.


What are "filters"?  Filters identify certain classes/groups of e-mail messages for which you specify processing instructions which Eudora then executes automatically as it downloads messages from a server. Examples include:
I guess you understand the concept.

How to set filters?
To set/modify filters, go to "Tools"/"Filters".  This will bring up the filter window. See screen shot my own filter window (on my home station) as an example below. Of course, if you have never used filters, the list of filters in the box on the left will be empty and you will start by clicking the "New" button beneath the box:


The details for the filter highlighted on the left are shown on the right. In this filter the "group of messages" is defined rather narrowly: that the message is sent from a particular e-mail address. Technically: that the "from:" field "contains" a specific e-mail address.

You can use different parts of the message  to set up a "match" and  there are many other options on how to compare/match a particular part of the message with what you specify.  Most of them are intuitively clear, but some are fairly technical like "matches regexp". I won't go into this here, but via use of "regular expressions" you make  your match definition as complex as you want (but you may want to take refresher course in formal logic first).

For people with lesser skills,  and you can simply connect two such conditions (pretty much the same way you construct a [Boolean] search a journal article data base).



And here is an example of such a definition ("using Boolean operators"):


In many cases, a simple definition will do. But let us finish the discussion of the first example (going back to the first screen shot). While the upper part of the right side contains the "match", the lower part defines the "action(s)". Note that several actions can be specified. In this example, the first action is to transfer the message immediately to the trash can; the second action is to keep some record of it, here by requested to record its arrival in the filter report. So, you won't get annoyed/disturbed by such a message, but if needs arises you can check whether more messages had been coming in.  The third action is to "skip rest", i.e., all the following filters will not  be applied to this message -- even if this message should "match" one of the following filters. One important lesson: the order of the filters is important and will affect the disposition of the incoming messages.  The filters can easily be reorders by clicking and dragging with your mouse.

Let us take a look at other available actions:


The "Transfer to" action is the most important for the purpose of this discussion, but note that you can also "forward" or "redirect" specific messages automatically.  So, you may want to set up a filter for each e-mail discussion/announcement list you are subscribed to and have incoming messages automatically be sorted in matching folder. Your inbox will stay clear and you can get to your "list folders" when time permits.

Let's go to the last filter in my list, the "junk filter":


Any message which has not been transferred yet (like all the e-mail list messages here) and which
  1. does not come from an address contained in my Eudora addressbook ("Eudora Nicknames") and
  2. which does not come from within the CUNY domain
is preliminary classified as "junk" and put in a folder which I chose to call "A-junk" (but you can call it anything you like).  Again, this keeps my Eudora inbox small and I can still look at all my mail, quickly scanning the "junk folder" whether there is a non-junk message.  The rest gets quickly  disposed of, highlight all messages (click first, then Shift-click the last) and transfer to Trash.

Here are a number of things you can do to keep the number of "false junk" classifications at a minimum:

Filters may seem a bit intimidating at first, and in the beginning you may not always to set a filter exactly the way you envisioned it. But it is really not that hard to learn to use filters, and there is a big payoff.

Good luck.