Basic mail handling
Mail folders
If you receive a lot of emails, you will probably soon find that your
Inbox folder is growing to the point where you have a hard time finding
an email again, even if you received it just a few days ago. This is why
Claws Mail, like most good mail clients, provides you with multiple
possibilities in organising your mails.
You can create as many folders and subfolders as you need. For example,
one folder for your family, one folder for friends, folders for
mailing-lists, archive folders for old mails that you still want to have
available, etc. To create a new folder, simply right-click on its parent
folder and choose New folder...
from the drop-down menu.
If you want to create a folder Friends
inside your Inbox
folder, for example, just right-click on the Inbox folder, choose
New folder...
, and type in Friends
in the
dialogue that appears. Click the OK button, and the new folder is
created.
Folder organisation
Now that you have created folders, you can manipulate them and their
contents using menu items or drag 'n' drop. Moving one folder into
another, for example, can be done by right-clicking on the folder you
want to move, choosing the Move folder...
menu item, and
selecting the destination folder. This will move the folder, with the
mail it contains, to a subfolder of the chosen folder. Alternatively,
you can drag a folder to another one by clicking on it, keeping the
mouse pressed, moving the mouse cursor over the destination folder and
releasing the button.
If you want to remove a folder and the mail it contains, simply
right-click on the folder and choose Delete folder...
. As
this is potentially harmful, (the mails in the folder will be deleted
and not recoverable), you will be asked for confirmation.
In the same manner that you move a folder to another one, you can move
emails from one folder to another. The same method applies for this:
either drag 'n' drop emails to a folder, or choose
Move...
after right-clicking on the mail. You can select
multiple emails by using the Control or Shift key while clicking on
them. You can also copy emails to another folder by pressing the Control
key when drag'n'dropping, or by choosing Copy...
from the
email's contextual menu.
IMAP subscriptions
The IMAP protocol allows one to store a list of subscribed folders. Most
mail user agents hide the unsubscribed folders away from the GUI, and have
a little window allowing to subscribe to these unsubscribed folders. In
Claws Mail, subscriptions are respected by default, and only subscribed
folders will be displayed. If you want to see all your folders, you can just
uncheck Show subscribed folders only
in the IMAP mailbox'
contextual menu or the account preferences. You'll be able to subscribe and
unsubscribe folders from this contextual menu too. If the unsubscribed
folders are hidden from the list, you will have two ways to subscribe to
a folder: either show all folders, subscribe the ones you want, and hide
unsubscribed folders again; or, if you know the folder's name, use
"Create new folder" in its parent's contextual menu.
Filtering
Once you have a nice folder hierarchy in place, you'll probably want
Claws Mail to sort your incoming emails automatically, in order to
avoid having to move messages manually each time they arrive. For this
you can use the Filtering feature.
You will find the filtering preferences via the
Configuration
menu, Filtering
item. From
this dialogue you will be able to define new rules, modify or delete
existing rules, re-order the rules, and enable/disable them. Filtering
rules are defined by five things: the enabled status, a name, an account
name, a condition, and an action. All disabled rules are simply ignored.
The Name
entry is optional, it's there to help you
identify your rules. An account name can be chosen, which will restrict
the rule to mail retrieved from the named account only, skipping it for
mail retrieved from all other accounts. The default value is
All
, which means that the rule is global and will
be applied to all mail, reagrdless of the account from which it was
retireved, (see paragraph below). The condition format is an expression
defining what Claws Mail should look for when filtering mail, for
example: to matchcase claws-mail-users
is for messages
sent to any address containing claws-mail-users
. You can
easily define conditions by clicking the Define...
button
at the right of the field. The last part of a filtering rule is the
action, which instructs Claws Mail what to do with mail matching
the condition we just defined. For example, mark_as_read
marks the mail as read as soon as it arrives in your inbox, or
move #mh/Mailbox/inbox/Friends
moves the mail to your
Friends
subfolder. Here, too, a Define...
button is available to help you define the action to take.
Filtering rules can be assigned to a single, specific account. To do
this select an account from the Account
combo below the
Name
entry. When you set a specific account the filtering
rule will only be applied to messages retrieved from the named account.
The default value is All
, which means that the rule will
be appied globally, to messages retrieved from any account. When filtering
messages manually, if there are any per-account filtering rules defined,
you will be asked what you wish to do with those rules. Possible choices
are to skip the rules, or apply these rules regardless of the account to
which they belong, or use the rules for the currently selected account.
Caution: if you unset the Show this message next time
checkbox and click Filter
, on subsequent manual filtering
this choice will be applied without any confirmation. Account specific
rules are only available for filtering, (at incorporation or manually),
the feature is not available for folder Processing or Pre/Post-Processing.
Once you have defined the rule, you can add it to the list of rules with
the Add
button. Don't forget that the order of the rules
is important: if Claws Mail finds a rule suitable for an email that
either moves or deletes the email, it will stop looking for further
rules for that email. This is why, at the right of the rules list, you
will find four buttons allowing the re-ordering of rules. The rules can
also be reordered by drag 'n' drop.
There is also a quick method of creating filtering rules based on the
selected message. After selecting a mail of the type you want to filter,
choose Create filter rule...
from the
Tools
menu, and choose a type from the submenu:
Automatically
mainly helps for mailing-lists posts,
by From
creates a filter based on the sender of the
email, by To
creates a filter based on the recipient, and
by Subject
creates a filter based on the subject. Each
one of these types of filtering has its advantages, it's up to you to
find out what would be the more practical. Usually,
by From
is nice to sort out your regular contacts' mails,
whereas by To
is more useful to sort mails sent to your
different accounts.
Searching
There are several methods for searching your emails.
One of them is relatively standard, and can be found in the
Edit
menu, it's the Search folder...
item.
This will open a window where you can specify one or more fields to
search in: From, To, Subject, and Body. After having specified your
criteria, click on the Back
or Forward
buttons to navigate through the matching emails, or use
Find all
to select all the matching emails at once. Be
aware that searching for text in the body of emails is much slower than
searching in its headers, because the body of emails isn't cached by
Claws Mail. Extended Search
mode can be turned on by
clicking the relevant checkbox, thus allowing you to use match expressions
like those used in Filtering
rules.
If you're looking at a large email and want to find a particular part
of it, you can use the Find in current message...
item of
the Edit
menu. This works like search in a text document.
The final way of searching for emails is using Quick Search
,
which you can display or hide by cilicking the little magnifying glass icon
under the Message List. It is also accessible from the Quick Search
item of the Edit
menu. Quick Search
is more
powerful than the normal search as it can search in standard headers (From,
To, Subject) or in Extended
mode using just about any
criteria you can think of. When in Extended
mode, the
Information
button is visible, enabling you to see the
search syntax. An Edit
button is also available which
allows you to quickly create a rule. You can also configure
Quick Search
to search recursively through subfolders,
whether it should reset itself when you change folders, and whether to
use Type-ahead search (this is a search which results update dynamically
if you pause in the typing).
When you hit Enter after having specified the search string, the Message
List will shrink to present you with only the matching messages. If you
set the search to be recursive, any subfolder of the current one that
has matching emails will change its icon to a magnifying glass icon.
This way, you can search in your whole mailbox at once. If the search is
in Sticky mode, the filter will stay applied when you go to another
folder. This can be disturbing at first, as you can forget about it, but
is useful in some cases, for example if you want to search in the body
of emails and are not sure of which folder contains the searched email:
a recursive search on the body of emails in a whole mailbox can be
really slow.