Changing Rules

You can use rules to direct incoming mail to particular mailboxes based on the contents of To, From, Sender, Subject, the entire message Header (everything but the body of the message), or the Body of the message.

  1. From the Account Options... menu, select Change My Processing Rules to go to the Change Rules page.

  2. Click Add or Modify (if you currently have rules to modify).

  3. From the drop-down menu select To/From/Sender/Subject/Header or Body to choose the area of the message to search.

  4. Select contains to have the rule look for messages that contain the search string; select doesn't contain to look for messages that do not contain the string.

  5. Enter a search string as described below.

  6. Select Case Sensitive Match to search for text that matches the case of the search string; to ignore case, clear Case Sensitive Match.

    Select one of the following Filter Actions to take on messages that meet the rule criteria.

  7. Click Add Condition. The condition is added to the rule and is displayed in the Rules text box. If this is the only condition you want the rule to have, click Finish, and the rule will be activated. If you want to add multiple conditions, see Adding Multiple Conditions to Rules.

Entering a Search String

Enter a search string by doing one or more of the following:

   

Text Pattern

Expression

Any character

.

Any of the values separated by vertical bars within the parentheses

(this|that|other)

Any word character (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) 

\w

Any non-word character   

\W

Any digit (0-9)

\d

Any non-digit 

\D

Any white space (spaces and/or tabs and/or carriage returns) 

\s

Any non-white space 

\S

Any punctuation character (any character other than \w or \s) 

\p

Any non-punctuation character

\P

   

Quantifier  

Expression

Zero or more  

*

One or more  

+

Exactly 100  

{100}

At least n1, but not more than n2 (where n1 and n2 are numbers)  

{n1,n2}

Note: The following characters have special meaning in a rule:

            {}()|*+,.:

If you want to use one of these characters in a search string, precede it with a backslash. For example, to search for a plus sign, enter \+ in the search string.