Help me filter emails in Eudora

June 5, 2006 3:39 PM

Mail filtering in Eudora.

I've been using Eudora at work for a while now, with a catch-all domain. My problem is that someone has been spamming with random names at my domain name, and we're losing valid emails in a torrent of bounces.

I can't just filter the bounces for fear of losing a legitimate one, so my question is this -

How do I set up filters in Eudora to allow email to any of four specific email addresses and to junk any others? I tried setting it as junking anything which *is not* a valid email address.

This required setting up four filters, and a filter which allows address 1 will junk address 2, 3 and 4. A filter allowing address 2 junks 1, 3 and 4 and so on.

I am sure this can be done, my knowledge is just lacking.

posted by tomble to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I haven't used Eudora in quite a while, but I imagine that it should support wildcards in it's filtering.

I'd just have two filters, both looking at all incoming mail. If the mail is from one of the four addresses, and then move it to the "Approved" folder. If the mail is _anything_ else, then move it to a "junk folder. The order matters, as most mail clients read filters top to bottom (in other words, add the 'approved' filters _before_ the 'junk' filter).

This site should cover the basics of setting up filters.
posted by triolus at 3:58 PM on June 5, 2006

I don't know Eudora, but Thunderbird allows you to specify multiple match criteria for each filter and choose whether any or all must match. So in Thunderbird, you'd need only one filter rule to do what you want:

Match all of
To: isn't [e-mail]
To: isn't [e-mail]
To: isn't [e-mail]
To: isn't [e-mail]
Delete message
Delete message from POP server

I'd be very surprised to find that Eudora filters are missing a similar feature.
posted by flabdablet at 5:13 PM on June 5, 2006

I wouldn't be surprised if that little "Ignore" menu item in the middle of the Eudora filter dialogs on the page triolus linked to turns into "and" or "or" and makes more header-match fields appear if you poke it.

But if it doesn't, then triolus's approach - with four specific approval filters followed by a toss-everything catchall - should work fine.
posted by flabdablet at 5:19 PM on June 5, 2006

Eudora can use regular expressions in its filtering, but A) I've spent five minutes trying to get even a simple one to work and can't seem to do it and B) doesn't have negation, i.e. you can say "matches" but not "doesn't match".

If you could do negation, it would be as simple as

!([e-mail]|[e-mail]|[e-mail])

which would mean "does not match any of (x or y or z).

If you can get it to match that and put the messages into a "good' folder, I guess that would be better than nothing.

However as I say, I can't even get it to match "bob" at this point (version 7.0.1) so it's all theoretical...
posted by AmbroseChapel at 5:47 PM on June 5, 2006

D'oh!

I finally realised my regular expressions were fine, but later filters were over-riding them. I added "skip rest" and this works just fine:

matches regular expression: ([e-mail]|[e-mail]|[e-mail])

so you can't say "not (X or Y or Z)" but you can say "matches (X or Y or Z)", whitelist those and discard the rest.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 5:59 PM on June 5, 2006