Overview of Inbound Rules

Click Inbound on the main menu to view your Inbound Rules. Inbound Rules read your e-mail and perform operations that you specify. The Inbound Rule pane allows you to Add, Edit, Delete and prioritise (Rule Order) your Inbound Rules.

An Inbound Rule has two parts, the Criteria and the Action.

The Criteria instructs MailRules which messages you want to perform an action upon.

The Action instructs MailRules what to do when it finds a message that meets the Criteria.

Criteria may be set against your message Subject, Sender or any files sent as Attachments (these are known as 'fields'). Rules can be established using one or more of the fields, and can include the wildcard characters * and ? for maximum flexibility.

For example, you could establish the Subject Criteria:

*newsletter*

and all messages with the word "newsletter" somewhere in the Subject line will be treated in the same way. Alternatively should you enter just:

newsletter

then only those messages with a subject line containing the single word "newsletter" would be processed by the rule.

Note: It is important to remember that only those mail messages that meet the established rules criteria will be handled by MailRules. All other mail will be left on the server and delivered to your Mail Client in the normal manner. If you are not using any other mail client see Exception Rule.

From the Inbound Rule menu:

• Clicking Add will allow you to create a new Inbound Rule.
• Clicking Edit will allow you to edit the Inbound Rule currently highlighted.
• Clicking Delete will allow you to delete the Inbound Rule currently highlighted (you will be asked to confirm before the delete is performed).
• Clicking Rule Order will allow you to arrange the order in which your Inbound Rules are applied to the e-mail you receive.

Please note that you can also Copy an existing Inbound Rule by clicking in the grid to highlight it and then selecting Edit-Copy from the main menu.

When MailRules checks your e-mail messages, every Rule in your library will be tested against every e-mail message and applied to all messages that match the Criteria. This means that one message could trigger multiple Rules - for these reasons please review Ordering Rules and Do not process any other rule.

There are a two parts to establishing any rule, the Criteria and the Action: First you must establish the criteria, ("set the rule"), then you specify the actions that you want to be performed when the rule is triggered.