UNHCE Information Technology & Distance Education Blog

Creating a filter in Eudora
There are a couple of different ways to create a message filter in Eudora. These instructions refer to the manual method as that is the most straightforward. Making filters automatically can easily result in your filtering unintended messages. For the example we will create a filter that will send messages to a junk mailbox if they contain the words turkey or stuffing in any of the message headers.

1. In Eudora go to the Tools menu and down to Filters. In the dialog box, click on the New button in the lower left-hand pane.

2. In the Match section (upper right-hand pane) click on Incoming. Then, using the pull-down menu make a selection in the Header box. Using will catch all headers, even those that are hidden.

3. The next selection box defaults to contains. This is the most common kind of filter, but there are other selections there that you can use to customize your filter.

4. In the field to the right of contains, enter the word to filter - turkey for our example.

5. If the word turkey were our only filter criteria, we would leave the next field set to ignore. Since we also want to catch the word stuffing, we would change this field to say or. Then, select in the next box and enter stuffing in the box to the right of contains.

6. In the Action box (lower right-hand pane) set the Action to Transfer to - A button will appear to the right that defaults to the In mailbox - Click right on the In button and go to New in the menu. The New Mailbox window will appear. Type in Junk for the name of the mailbox and click OK. Do not put a check in the box for "Make it a Folder".

7. Go to the File menu and click Save.

You have just created a filter that will automatically send any email with turkey or stuffing in any of its headers straight to your Junk mailbox. It is safer to direct your filtered mail to a mailbox other than Trash so that you do not automatically delete all the messages in there. This affords you the opportunity to review the mail that has been trapped by the filter before you dump it, just in case you've caught something that was legitimate.

One final caution - do not attempt to setup a filter for the phrase xxx using the option . Often xxx is used internally in headers as a result of timing errors, routing options, etc. If you would like to filter out this phrase, please limit it to the Subject header.