Rules

I’m evaluating eM Client as a replacement for Becky Internet Mail.

I cannot make the rules work as I want:

  1. When I make a rule to move a message to folder, everything is fine. But when I move or rename the folder, the rule gets invalid. You should either rename the folder in the rule, too, or at least clearly mark the invalid rules in the rules editor.

  2. I can set a filter to all mails from @domain.com, but not from their subdomains. A filter to domain.com, *domain.com, %domain.com, .*domain.com does not work.

  3. It would be nice to create a rule not only by right-clicking the sender and create a rule from that sender, but also from right-clicking a mail and pre-using more fields from the email when I check them (so e. g. start with the sender only, but when I click words from header, pre-enter the header).

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Item 3 looks like “Create rule from message” in OE and “Create filter from message” in Thinderbird.
Very useful feature, if implemented.

I find the Rules section in Help to be completely unintelligible.  Is there, anywhere, a set of examples of rules that actually work?  I want to filter unwanted items from my inbox (to my trash).  So far, having found eM unhelpful, I  use Gmail’s filters to delete unwanted mail before it arrives in my eM inbox.

Rules in eM Client is fairly basic. Could you give an example of the filter in Gmail, that you can’t do in eM Client?

Yes, Create Filter From in Thunderbird is one of the best available in Windows clients.

Yes, clearly I have difficulty with “basic” instructions.  Thanks.

After a couple dozen attempts, I have not been able to create an eM rule that moves an unwanted email (by sender address, by key word, by subject) from my eM inbox to Trash. I can do it in Gmail, and AOL.

I want to see an example (not directions, not explanations) of an eM rule that actually works.

This is the Rule I use to move emails from this forum arriving in my Inbox to the eM Client folder. So this is by sender address.


This is an example of messages that will be deleted because newsletter appears in the subject. So by subject.


This is an example of messages that will be deleted if the word Viagra is in the subject or body. So by key word.

There is still no answer for the second – very very important question:

“2. I can set a filter to all mails from @domain.com, but not from their subdomains. A filter to domain.com, *domain.com, %domain.com, .*domain.com does not work.”

This is a rudimentary filter function, so that e. g. mails from the Amazon Marketplace can be filtered, which have a randomly generated string before the “@”.
Or is it possible, to create a rule from a search filter?

Currently I solve the “amazon challenge” by processing the header entry “from: amazon” – seems to work, but not shure.

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Yes NoSi, your solution using the header does work for all email @amazon.com and it’s subdomains. This was discussed in another thread recently, but I can’t find it at the moment.

Unfortunately your solution will also work for something like [email protected], or “Mike Amazon” <[email protected]> . Better to use From: amazon.com. Hopefully you aren’t planning to purchase anything from Amazon in the future, because you will not get a confirmation from them. :slight_smile:

The solution was originally mentioned by Bill Collard in his message at https://forum.emclient.com/emclient/topics/rule-from-domain-address-not-working

Hi Gary – thanks for reply. I added “from:amazon.de” and “from.amazon.com” to sort all messages into an amazon folder – not junk :wink:

Up to now I am using TheBat, which has very sofisticated filter options with regular expressions (but other restictions, that ́s why I am testing emClient…).

I wonder, why I can`t use a search filter aswell for rules instead of having a “search folder” (not shure, if this is the correct naming in English).

I’m thinking about changing to emClient, which is advertised with “Advanced rule administration”. However, even simple rules apparently cannot be applied or do not work.

How should a rule look like, where all mails are sorted into the junk folder containing one or more matching words?

A simple rule that only has to find the signle word “bitcoin” in the message body to moves the mail to the junk folder is ignored. These mails remain in the Inbox.

I am used to create complex rules with regular expressions so I am quite shure, that I do understand the simple apperarence of rule definition in emClient.

I am used to create complex rules with regular expressions so I am quite shure, that I do understand the simple creation of rule definition in emClient. But nowhere I can find a hint, how more than one word in a list is filtered. How are they combined (AND, OR), and how are the rule parts combined (AND, OR)? How can I influence this, because a lot of rules need OR instead of AND (which is the preset, as it seems).

The rule to move bitcoin to junk:

In eM Client Rules AND cannot be applied to e.g. a list of words. So you cannot find an email with bitcoin and free investment in the body. All lists are processed with OR. So the rule below will be processed with bitcoin or free investment in the body.

AND can be applied to other options like this:

A useful additional option in the above is EXCEPT.

Can you please describe, how you created the rule “with ‘Viagra’ found in body OR subject”? I can only create AND

Yes, just scroll down the list, and you will find an option with words found in body or subject.

One way to use AND is like this. But it is fairly limited, so you cannot add a third AND.

I have not been able to get that to work no matter how I put the “from” in, it only works if the exact email address matches. Version 7.1.32792.0
Is there a trick to it?

If you want to use partial words or addresses, the best way is to use with words found in the header. Say you want to find all messages from the domain me.com , then you use From: me.com. Works every time. You can use any part of the address, so From: Bob would also work.

Of course that will also give you everything from e.g. time.com , so you can use @me.com to narrow it down.

Hi Steven

As I wrote months ago, the filtering of emClient is quite poor. I experienced until now that besides searching is  horribly slow, the findings are not  reliable. It seems as if emC is designed for small amounts of messages that can / should be searched and filtered manually.  The main disatvantage: you can not filter by regular rules, eg “foob[aeiou]r” to find ‘foobar’, ‘foober’ etc. but not ‘foobbr’, ‘foobcr’ etc.

As a personal experience I can say that  only true literal matching is supported in all fields, logicall combinations  badly (EG “OR” sequetial “AND”). Therefore it is nearly impossible to filter generally a domain but dedicated adress areas are let through.

A big problem for me: You can select single adresses, but even this is not working properly in any case eg if there are rules matching parts of it. You have to design your rules much more carefully as I know it from e-mail-clients with regular expressions. Comparing to them, emC e-mail filtering  is a big backstep for me.

I switched to filtering with the options of my postbox server-sided. This is quite more successful, I have much more options and as a result it is time saving. But objectivly, this can not be the solution, it is a poor substitute.

I am still hoping, that the developers will take a sneak view on eg “The Bat” which has very sophisticated options of filtering and uses them incredibly fast even with huge postboxes (> 50,000 mails/box).

NoSi, if you use the found in header option, you can use multiple addresses in the search, as well as using foob to find foobar.