Sometimes you get emails that you just don’t want to read. Maybe it’s a person you like who’s driving you batshit. Maybe it’s someone who’s actually harassing you. If you use Gmail, you can filter emails and they go into a folder or your trash-bin, and you don’t have to read them ever again! If you self-host, though, the steps are a little different.
The first thing I do is make a new folder to hold these emails. I have some filters set up to auto-turf spam and viruses. But for people who harass me, I like to save their emails for review and reporting. Yes, I report them to the authorities when needed, and I save them so I can have their IP and routing info. Because of that, I have a built in folder on my email accounts for ‘Harassment.’
Obviously you can teach your email client how to do this, and there are tutorials galore about how to get Mail.app, Thunderbird and Outlook to filter emails. But me, I like to have the filter happen before I open my email box, so I don’t have to even consider it.
Once you’ve made the folder, go into cPanel and click on User Level Filtering. This allows you to make a filter per-email on your server. If you want to filter all emails for all emails on your account, there’s Account Level Filtering, which I use for the aforementioned spammers and virus senders. Also for all mail in non-English encoding. I’m hopelessly mono-lingual.
Next, select the account you want to add the filter for. This one is pretty obvious, no?
This screen will show you all your filters. I happen to have an existing one to filter someone’s constant requests for information. Since we want to create a new filter, click the Create a new Filter button.
Now we’re getting started! Give the filter a useful name. I used ‘Harassment’ since I’m going to be adding in all the emails who harass me, and just dump them into one folder. The email I’ve added is one someone made up. It’s not real so don’t bother spamming it. There are a lot more options under the Rules section, but this one is pretty straightforward for me. I want all emails from jorjafox@gmail.com to be dumped into Harassment.
Actions, which is just below the rules, is where you decide what happens. You can have multiple actions, the default of which is to discard the email. This means it gets deleted. You never see it. I don’t want this, I want to Deliver to Folder
Once I’ve picked the action, I have to actually tell it which folder. This is where I pick Harassment.
Put together, the whole thing looks like this:
There are a lot more actions you can perform. One of them is NOT ‘Mark as Read’, which annoys me sometimes since my mail app will show my unread count, and I like to keep that low. I have no more than 10 emails, total, in my many inboxes at any one point in time, and the only ones unread are ones I have yet to answer or action (i.e. I have to do something before the email’s ‘done’). You can, however, add as many emails as you want. Just make sure you use OR and not AND for the emails.
Once you’re happy with your settings, click activate and you’re done! Now that annoying person will be chump-dumped into a folder and stop cluttering your inbox!
