Automatic filter and folder building

[John T. Dow]

Let's say I get mail from 3 new people today. This is the sort of thing I need to do for each.

1) Open the mail and read it. 

2) If I don't recognize the sender, I usually have to look to see if I have a folder for that person (ie I have 
merely forgotten who the person is). This means scrolling through the list of folders looking for this 
person.

3) Create a folder (involves scrolling back to the parent folder to create a new child folder).

4) Move the mail into the new folder. Involves finding the just created folder in the listbox, and naturally 
it's at the bottom of the list since it's a new entry.

5) Run filter builder to create a filter for the sender. In so doing, once again I have to scroll though the 
folders to tell the filter where to move the mail to. Note: I've just typed or pasted the person's name to 
create the folder, now I have to enter it again to name the filter.

6) Edit the filter so it captures outgoing mail as well as the incoming mail from this person.

7) Apply the new manual filter to move the mail into the folder.

8) Go to the new folder to reply to the mail. Note: If I get distracted at this point, there is nothing to tell 
me whose folder I just created, so I'm in trouble if I forget. Again, I have to scroll through the list of 
folders to find this one.

8) Reply to the mail.

In contrast, I would like to be able to take a quick look at the mail and thenn move it into an "autofile" 
folder. At some point when I'm ready to reply to it/them, I would run a utility that would create a folder 
for each person who sent me mail and also create the filters for incoming and outgoing mail for those 
people. Adding them to the right mouse button list also would be a nice option I suppose.

The mail should also be flagged as new so that I would see the folders with new mail and would know 
which ones I need to reply to.

I would then just scroll through the folders, looking for those with new mail, open, read, and reply.

I can dream, can't I?

At present I have folders for over 350 people, each created by this laborous process.

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E-mail: jtd@pgh.net         URL: www.johntdow.com

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