[Formerly titled “filtering messages in Firefox” – sorry for the confusion.]
Here is the situation. I have emails addressed to three separate addresses coming to me on my computer — “ellen@work.org,” “newsletter@work@org” and “pressroom@work.org.” It is the “pressroom” account that is causing me trouble by polluting my general Inbox.
Like many email users, I suspect, I have created folders and filters for most of the people I, Ellen, receive email from. Emails from anyone with whom I correspond infrequently just go to my general Inbox. Email from readers of my newsletter to into a folder I have created for it specifically.
The problem is with the pressroom account. Many of these are bulk-mailings which have nothing to do with us. Yet I keep them because sometimes there is some valuable tidbit I might need for my work. The solution would seem to be create a filter and folder for “pressroom@work.com” right?
Well, the problem is that while these bulk emails are technically addressed to “pressroom,” in the “To” field is a person’s name at the organization. IE, the “to” and the “from” are the same. They are hiding their list.
(I don’t blame them, I sometimes do the same thing myself if I don’t want everyone on my list to know who everyone is that’s getting my email. Also, if you promise not to share it with others, it’s a nice policy not to have it right up there for everyone to see. Lastly, you don’t get a header four miles long if there are a lot of names on the list.)
SO … my problem is I am missing occasional emails from my infrequent correspondents because they are drowning in a sea of “pressroom” emails.
Is there a way to MAKE the filter find the “pressroom@work” email address in the header code and direct it to a filter folder I’ve created?
Hm. No. I already know how to make a filter; I’ve got dozens of them for filtering email coming from various people.
The problem is there is no way to filter for these emails coming in from, say the Better Business Bureau to “pressroom.” The BBB sends this email out to 200 media outlets. When it arrives in my Inbox, under “To” is the name of a person at the BBB, NOT the email address, which is “pressroom@work.org.” I can make it work, yes, by putting rules in the filter for every blame person that’s got our pressroom email address, which would be time-consuming and out of date in probably a week.
“pressroom@work.org” IS imbedded (or whatever the word is) in the header of such emails (I checked) so at least theoretically, what I wish to do should be possible. I can’t figure it out though.
Just a thought (I have so far never needed to create a filter in Thunderbird). I see one of the possibilities when creating a filter is to select “Customize” which then prompts you for a message header. If you view all headers in one of the messages you filter, does one of the headers (maybe Original-recipient) show up with the e-mail address you want to filter out? If so, try filtering on that.
Are you checking emails of several different accounts with Thunderbird?
You can certainly add filters for anything. In the filter tool in the listbox where you choose from to etc. there is customize. This will allow you to use any header field that you can make up.
or, if all else fails, you can achieve what you need - conversely:
you can create a filter with a “to” address field for the emails you want to read, move those to a folder and only pay attention to that one folder.
But if you’re generally just giving up, then yeah… Woe is thee
I would be really surprised if there were no way to do this in Thunderbird (I don’t use it myself, but I was able to do this with any other e-mail program I’ve used in the past to manage multiple e-mail accounts: Claris Mail (a long time ago), Eudora, Mail (for OS X).
Ellen Cherry, how do your multiple accounts show up in Thunderbird? Aren’t they separated in the “tree” in the left-hand side, like I see in a screenshot near the bottom of this page? http://www2.cit.cornell.edu/email/thunderbird/account-both.html (Account Settings window)
I used to use a program called Mailwasher. You could set it up to filter out mail from unwanted senders.
You would let Mailwasher download the emails, mark the ones that you wanted to delete, and keep the rest. It would then automatically “check” the emails for deletion if it was from the same sender the next time. You could also mark the whole address e.g. anyone from yahoo.com could be marked for deletion (I think I recall this correctly).
The free version would only work with one account, the pay version would do multiple accounts. It’s easy to use too.
Eventually the spam went from a flood to a trickle and I no longer use it. But I sure liked using it when I needed it.
Thunderbird’s Message Filter dialog box includes a drop-down list of MOST of the common headers; the one you want is missing, but it’s easy to add. At the bottom of that drop-down list is the option “customize”; click that. A new box will appear.
The header you want is called “Delivered-To” – type it into the edit line, click “Add,” and it will appear in the box below. Now click “OK.” From now on, when you go to that drop-down list, “Delivered-To” will appear as an option. Select it, and be on your merry.
I believe that I have tried all these suggestions. Perhaps I am doing it wrong. I have tried to customize the filter, but when I run it on the emails I’ve already got, it doesn’t filter them, so I conclude it doesn’t work … or that I’m doing it wrong (option B is more likely).
Arnold, all the email from all three accounts go to my inbox. I have successfully filtered out two accounts into appropriate folders, but I can’t seem to do it with these email which actually ARE addressed to the pressroom email address, but it doesn’t show that (at least to me).
Perhaps I’m not well-versed in Email Theory. I’ll ask some tech people at work and see if they can give me a hand.
Well, that’s bizarre; I just double-checked, and Thunderbird apparently doesn’t receive the “Delivered-To” header. But there is another way!
Follow the same customizing procedure to add “Received” to the list. Create the new filter as “Received” “contains” “for<pressroom@work.com>”; this should do the job.
