What are these web pages for?
What are message filters?
How do I manipulate my message filters, vacation
notice, and forwarding address?
The message filters
Enabling JavaScript support
With these web pages, you may construct message filters to screen the mail messages delivered to your mailbox. You can tell your mail server to discard unwanted mail messages based upon addresses and phrases appearing in the messages. Discarded messages are never delivered to your mailbox -- they are automatically thrown away by your mail server.
You may also tell your mail server which mail messages to always accept. This feature allows you, for instance, to discard all mail from a specific site with the exception of that from a few specific individuals at that site.
These web pages also allow you to set up a vacation notice. This is a notification sent in reply to messages you receive while you are on vacation or otherwise away for a period of time. This allows you to notify your correspondents that there may be a delay in receiving a response to their messages.
These web pages also allow you to set an address to forward all of your mail to.
Every day, when you return home from work or school you probably look through the postal letters which you received that day. As you look through them, you undoubtedly throw some letters out without even opening them. You discard them based upon some selection criteria that you have. Those criteria are "message filters". You use them to filter -- or sort if you will -- your letters into two groups: those letters which you will open and those which you will not. Message filters filter out "junk" mail which you wish to discard.
Just as you manually filter your postal letters, you can filter your electronic mail messages (e-mail). And, better yet, you can have your mail server do this for you automatically. You tell the mail server, via these web pages, your selection criteria and the mail server then applies them to your incoming mail messages. Mail messages to be discarded are silently discarded by the mail server; they are never delivered to your mailbox thus saving you the tedium of deleting them yourself.
However, as with all good things (especially automated ones!), some care and moderation should be applied. For example, before blindly rejecting all mail messages containing the phrase "money", think about who might send you mail of interest with that phrase -- a son or daughter at college, or a wealthy uncle perhaps. You might want to use the Accept filters described below to override any Discard filters you set up. For instance, "always accept messages from my children and my company, but discard all other messages with the phrase 'money'".
How do I manipulate my message filters, vacation
notice, and forwarding address?
At the top of each web page, immediately below the "Mailbox Filters" banner, is a set of navigation links which allow you to:
Use these links to move to amongst the various message filtering, vacation notice, and forwarding address web pages. For instance, click on the "Show Message Filters" link to display your message filters, and click on the "Show Vacation Notice" link to display your current vacation notice setup. Click on the appropriate Accept or Discard filter link to change that filter.
The "Help" link will always take you to this page. The specific Accept, Discard, and Vacation Notice change pages also have "HELP" buttons. Those buttons will take you to specific instructions and help for using that particular page.
Your mailbox has a set of eight filters which are used to control the selection criterion applied to your mailbox. The names and usages of these eight filters are listed in the table below:
| Filter name | Usage |
|---|---|
| Accept From | The Accept From filter is a list of sender e-mail addresses and host names. Mail messages from any address or host appearing in this list are always accepted and never discarded. |
| Accept To | The Accept To filter is a list of recipient e-mail addresses and host names. Mail messages to any address or host appearing in this list are never discarded. |
| Accept Subject | The Accept Subject filter is a list of words and phrases. Mail messages with a Subject: header line containing any word or phrase from this list are never discarded. |
| Accept Body | The Accept Body filter is a list of words and phrases. Mail messages whose body (the text of the message) contains any word or phrase from this list are never discarded. |
| Discard From | The Discard From filter is a list of sender e-mail addresses and host names. Mail messages with a Subject: header line from any address or host appearing in this list are discarded. |
| Discard To | The Discard To filter is a list of recipient e-mail addresses and host names. Mail messages to any address or host appearing in this list are discarded. |
| Discard Subject | The Discard Subject filter is a list of words and phrases. Mail messages with a Subject: header line containing any word or phrase from this list are always discarded. |
| Discard Body | The Discard Body filter is a list of words and phrases. Mail messages whose body (the text of the message) contains any word or phrase from this list are always discarded. |
The Accept filters are applied before the Discard filters. This way, the Accept filters can override the action of a Discard filter. That is, if an Accept filter applies to a particular incoming mail message, then the Discard filters are ignored for that message.
The three filters you will probably use the most are the Discard From, Discard Subject, and Discard Body filters. The other filters you will use much less often, if at all.
To use these web pages, you need to enable JavaScript support in your web browser. Most browsers have this enabled by default so normally you do not need to do anything. If the SUBMIT buttons do not work correctly, then you will need to enable JavaScript support.
How you enable JavaScript depends upon what browser you use. Below are directions for Netscape Comminicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Netscape Communicator
From the "Edit" menu, select "Preferences...". From the pop-up "Netscape:
Preferences" window, select the "Advanced" category. In the resulting panel,
check the "Enable JavaScript" box and then click the "OK"
button.
Microsoft Internet Explorer
You cannot normally disable JavaScript support in Internet Explorer.
Therefore, it should not be necessary to enable them.