Filter rules

🧹 Filter rules

• Filter rules that combine as many conditions as you need, matched on all or any of them, against the sender, the recipients, the subject, the sender's whole domain or every field at once, with case matching per condition.
• A rule can mark read, flag, move to a folder of your choice or delete permanently, run on every account or only the ones you pick and be reordered, switched off or set to stop later rules. Left to themselves they act on the Inbox and only on mail arriving after you write them, so adding one never reaches back over the mail you already have; a mailbox the server renumbers is taken as it stands rather than as new mail. One gap remains: mail another program moves into the Inbox arrives under a new number, so a rule treats it as new. Adding an account is the one exception: its first sync applies your rules' mark-read and flag actions to what its Inbox already holds, while their moves and deletions never touch that backlog
• Filter rules and message templates each have their own button on the title bar, so neither is buried in a menu
• A NOT switch on each condition, so every comparison has its opposite: is not, does not start with, does not end with, does not contain.
• A negated condition is an exclusion and a rule always applies it, so one rule says any of these, never those: keep filing the two shops you buy music from while excluding a sender you never want filed. The editor prints the joining word between the rows and marks an exclusion as one, so a rule reads as what it does rather than leaving you to work it out

▶️ Applying and sharing rules

• A Now button on each rule applies it to the mail you already have, across every folder of every account that rule covers. It shows you what the rule found first, counting the stored messages it was checked against and the ones it would mark, flag, move or delete, then acts only once you agree; a rule that would change nothing says so rather than asking.
• A rule that deletes says plainly that the deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. A progress bar counts folders while it checks and messages while it applies, so a long run says how far along it is rather than leaving you guessing; Cancel stops one that is taking longer than you want.
• Stopping is not an undo: the report then tells you what had already been done, because that part really did happen. Either way you are told what actually happened, so a run the server partly refused names the part that landed
• Export your rules to a file and import them on another machine. The file is readable JSON naming a move's destination as the account and mailbox path, so you can open it, read it and hand-edit it.
• An import tells you what the file holds before it writes anything: what arrives, what replaces a rule of the same name, what comes in switched off and which of them move or delete mail.
• A rule that cannot run here, because it names a folder or accounts this installation does not have, arrives switched off rather than silently doing nothing, so it works once that folder syncs or that account is added