Posted: 26 Jan 2005

In recent weeks, we have looked at Evolution and what makes it so great. Last week, I wrote an article about how to set up your email account. That was quite painless. So, now we are receiving email. Well, what if we want to sort our messages into different folders as they come into the inbox? This is also a very simple task. Let's run through how to set it up.

Go ahead and start up Evolution. Then, go up to the TOOLS menu, and click on FILTERS:

A small window appears. At the top is a drop-down box. Let's just make sure it says "incoming":

To add a new filter, we'll just click ADD. The "Add Rule" window comes up:

For our example, I am going to set up a rule to filter all of the email that comes from my brother, Brett, into his own folder.

In the "Rule Name" box, put a name in. It can be anything, but I'd name it something that makes sense. I'm going to name mine "Brett's Email."

In the IF part, we need to put in a condition. For my example, I'm filtering on the sender of the email, my brother, Brett. So, I'll leave the first drop-down box set to SENDER, and the second drop-down box set to CONTAINS. In the empty text box, I'm going to put in his email address. It will look something like this:

So now Evolution knows what it's looking for. However, once the program finds a matching email, what will it do with that message? Right now, Evolution does not know what to do with it. Let's tell it what to do with these messages.

In the THEN part, I am going to leave the first drop-down set to MOVE TO FOLDER. So now, I need to tell it which folder. To do this, I click the CLICK HERE TO SELECT A FOLDER button. A small window comes up with the list of folders. I will select the folder named "Brett" and then click OK:

When we get back to the ADD RULE window, we can see that when Evolution finds these messages, it will move them to the folder called "Brett":

Now, we can click OK on this window. Then, we are taken back to the FILTERS window, where we will again click OK.

Sweet! The new rule is in effect. All email that comes from my brother automatically gets sent to the folder bearing his name.

You can set rules with many different criteria and actions for handling these rules. They are wonderful tools for sorting the family mailing list from the work-related messages. You can even use them to delete spam automatically. Evolution has some powerful tools. Filter rules is only one of them. There is so much more there that you can put to work for you. Next time, I will discuss another of the many ways to do this.