Lotus Notes Tip: How to Create an E-mail Filter
Suppose you have e-mail you’re receiving in Lotus Notes, but you don’t need to read it every time it arrives. You can use mail rules to have Notes automatically filter new messages you receive that meet certain conditions.
For example, you subscribe to a weekly e-mail called the Monday Motivating Moment. You don’t get around to reading it every Monday, but you don’t want it cluttering your otherwise empty in-box. You could create a rule that checks for messages from the sender or contains the subject Monday Motivating Moment and moves the message to a folder called Motivation. Notes automatically moves the messages to the folder, where you can read it at your convenience.
Notes stores the mail filters you create in the Rules folder in your mail database. You can go there to add new rules as well as work on the ones you’ve created. For example, you can edit rules, change their order so that one rule has priority over another, turn them off when you don’t want to use them, or delete them entirely.
What is a filter
A filter, or e-mail filter, is simply a set of “instructions” that tells Notes how to deal with select e-mails under certain conditions. You set (configure)which e-mails are to be dealt with and how you wish to deal with them.
To create a filter (rule)
The Simple Process
1. Select an e-mail in your in-box and select Create QuickRule from the Tools drop-down menu.
2. A dialogue box opens and the options boxes are populated with information related to the selected message
3. Follow the three steps on the dialogue, click okay and the rule (filter) is created.
The Detailed Process
1. Open your mail database and in the navigation pane, click Tools and then Rules.
2. Click the “New Rule” button on the Action Bar.
and the New Rule dialogue box will open.
3. Create a Condition by selecting a part of messages to check (such as “sender” or “subject”), from the drop-down box.
5. Select a state (such as “contains” or “does not contain”), from the drop-down box.
6. Enter the criteria to check for (such as the name of a certain person or a certain word) and click the Add button
For example, you could select “sender” and “contains,” and then enter Monday Motivating Moment to filter all messages sent to you by Monday Motivating Moment.
Note: The “contains” condition works on partial words, and is not case sensitive. You could select “sender” and “contains,” and then enter Al or al to filter all messages sent to you by anyone named Al, Alice, Alex, or Alicia. Don’t put quotation marks around entries in the condition field, or you may see an error message.
7. About half-way down this window, you’ll see Specify Actions. In this example, we will have the filtered message moved to the folder labelled Motivation. Click the Add Action button.
8. The new rule (filter) will be listed.
9. Anytime you need to edit or delete a rule, come back to this view, select the rule and make your changes.
Related Posts:
How to Create a To-Do from an E-mail in Lotus Notes
How to Create a Calendar Entry from an E-mail in Lotus Notes
10 Lotus Notes Tips
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