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Revised Mail Filtering

Created by dave. Last edited by dave, 12 years and 159 days ago. Viewed 2,473 times. #4
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(October 19 2011)

So yeah, I actually have an iPhone now, so this becomes less academic.

It turns out that I rely on filters even more than I thought.

Basically I end up with three classes of stuff coming in:

  • stuff I want delivered to my phone and need to be alerted on arrival (pager notifications, email from the wife)
  • stuff I care enough about to want to see on my phone, but do NOT want to be notified on arrival (chatter from coworkers, mostly)
  • everything else, which I don't want to see on my phone at all (automated noise from systems, which can number upwards of 200 per might)
This is kind of important when we're on pager, since my rule of thumb is if I'm not expected to do anything about it, I shouldn't be notified about it. I don't want to be checking each of the 200+ robotic notifications overnight to see if maybe this is one I really need to do something about. See, everything that wakes me up wakes the wife up, and I really don't want to be exiled to the basement every time I come up on the pager rotation.

So to accomplish this, I have three rules in my Exchange account.

Rule 1:
Criteria:

  • Stuff marked low priority
Action:
  • move to Inbox-Filtered-Out
  • stop processing rules on this message
Rule 2:
Criteria:
  • stuff marked normal priority
Action:
  • move to Inbox-Filtered-Out
  • stop processing rules on this message
Except:
  • if it is to: or cc: me
  • if it is from (list of people which includes my wife and the pager-relayer)
  • or if it is to (specific address which I am responsible for responding to)
Rule 3:
Criteria:
  • stuff marked normal priority
Action:
  • move to Inbox-For-Me
  • stop processing rules on this message
Except:
  • if it is from my wife or the pager-relayer
  • or if it is to (specific address which I am responsible for responding to)
Result

So after all that, the only things left in my Inbox (and therefore triggers the phone alerting me to its arrival) should be stuff from my wife, or something that I need to be alerted on (or is marked as High priority). The rest of the moderately important stuff ends up in Inbox-For-Me, and everything else is shunted to Inbox-Filtered-Out.

If I have my phone and want to see what the coworkers are talking about, I can look in Inbox-For-Me.

And on Outlook, I use a Search Folder called Inbox-All as my main view of looking at email, and I see everything in one view, which is how I like to roll. So that way I can treat all three Inboxes as a single Inbox.

How You Leave Your iPhone Counts

The way I've been reading mail is I wait to get alerted and then check. If I want to look in the Inbox-For-Me folder, I select it, and that folder gets updated.

But be careful. If you Lock or Home out of the email reader from folder Inbox-For-Me (or from the folder list if the last folder you had open was Inbox-For-Me) then the iPhone will continue to alert on messages as they are delivered to Inbox-For-Me. To prevent this, either Lock or Home out of the Inbox, or out of the folder index after the last folder you had open was Inbox.

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