You can set up a mail filter that tells Messenger what to do with incoming messages. For example, you could store all incoming messages that have the word "gardening" in the message's subject in your "Gardening" folder. Or, you assign all messages coming from your boss the highest priority. For each action you want performed, you must set up a separate filter. For example, to perform the actions described above, you would create separate filters called "Move to Gardening" and "Boss."

Those who primarily use WebMail instead of Messenger may wish to use WebSieve instead. See Overview of Filters and the more specific Spam Filter instructions.

Creating a message filter

1. From the Edit menu, choose Message Filters.
2. Click New.
3. Type a name for the filter.
4. Choose the conditions that you want to check for in new messages.
5. Choose the action that you want the filter to perform on new messages.
6. Click OK to close the Filter Rules dialog box.
7. Click OK to close the Mail Filters dialog box.

You can add fields to create multiple conditions by clicking on the More button. After creating multiple conditions, be sure to click on "Match any of the following" or "Match all of the following."

Spam Filtering

Oakton's mail server automatically detects common aspects of spam and calculates the probability that a particular message is such. Rather than blocking it, the message is still sent to your inbox but with the message header appended to include a spam status rating.

For example:

X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=5.7 required=5.0	(A rating higher than 5.0 means the message contains more than the minimum number of typical spam-related features necessary to ID the message as Spam.)
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.7 required=5.0	(This lower rating indicates that few spam-related aspects were identified in the message. It may still be Spam but it is more likely to be a normal message that happens to contain some Spam-like elements.)

As this suggests, you can set up your own spam filter with the settings shown in the illustration below.

Note that the required 5.0 rating (as of fall 2003) is set for all users at the server level and cannot be individually customized. Thus some spam will still make it through so you may wish to set up additional filters based on other criteria. Messages can be sent to trash based on such things as sender name or subjects.

Deactivating a filter

You can deactivate a filter if you want to temporarily prevent it from applying to incoming messages.

1. From the Edit menu, choose Mail Filters.
2. Click the checkmark to the right of the filter name to deactivate it. Inactive filters have a dot instead of a checkmark to the right of their names. To reactivate a filter, click the dot to restore the checkmark.
3. (Windows and Unix) Click OK. (Macintosh) Click the close box.