The Entourage User's WebLog

There was recently a post on the newsgroups about some poor soul who couldn't start Entourage because they had 270,000 emails in the Inbox. This was primarily due to a deluge of Spam, at the rate of about 5,000 per day. Still that means they had left things for about two months before they had dealt with anything. While his experience may be extremely extreme, I am constantly surprised how few people make any great effort to keep their mail organised.

Me? I'm at the opposite end of the scale. I take it as a personal affront if any mail hits the inbox, without being intercepted and re-filed before it gets there. Lucky for me that Entourage has 3 built in methods to help you organise things easily. These are the Mailing List Manager (MLM), the Junk Mail Filter (JMF) and Mail Rules (no acronym for that one!). What's more, that is the order in which they operate, which will shortly become a significant piece of information.

Let's look at each of these in some greater detail...

The Mailing List Manager

This is only of any use if you make use of mailing lists, such as the Entourage:Mac mailing list, TidBITS, Apple Lists or any one of about a million different public or private lists out there.

If you do subscribe to a mailing list (assuming that list is served by a dedicated List Server - most of them are), there is a very easy way to organise the mail coming from that list. Simply select any mail from the list server, and from the 'Tools' menu, select 'Mailing List Manager'. A small window will open up listing all you MLM entries in there. First time you do this the window is empty. Simply click on the 'new' button in the small toolbar at the top of the window, and a new window opens, which should be already filled in with the lists details. It should look something like this:
I have added the check in the box to move the list mail to a dedicated folder and also to move any messages I send to the list to that same folder. I don't automatically set a category for list mail (I use categories in other ways, which I may blog about another day). In the simplest form, that's all you need to do. Now, any list mail will automatically be moved to the folder you selected as it arrives - already, with just that one mouse-click, you have started to diminish the load on your inbox and get your email sorted out!

However, you can go further. Click into the 'Advanced' tab in that window, and see these options (on the right)
You can see that I haven't used many of these options, and most people probably never will. let's explore them, however. Alternate address is used if messages from the list can come from another address as well - this sometimes happens with a moderated list when some messages intercepted by the moderator come from their address instead of the main list address, but such situations are few and far between. the admin address seems to be reminder only at this time - maybe the MacBU are intending to put in auto-subscribe/unsubscribe functionality into Entourage at some point in the future. certainly nothing you put into that field has any effect at the moment.

I can't think why you would want to mark messages as read when they arrive, but apparently some people do. the option is there if you are one of them. Some lists insist on a prefix to subjects to/from the list. this will automatically add them. Personally, I hate them. Rules & list messages can be a complex issue. I suspect that most people who are using the MLM to file list messages will not want any rules to run on list messages and muck things up.

'Delete Copies' is handy for some people. They have sent a message to the list, and when the message is distributed most lists will send a copy to all subscribers _including_ the sender. if you don't want copies of your own messages coming back to you, just check this box. they'll be deleted before you see them.

Do you know about Digests? Most Mailing Lists give you the option of either receiving every message sent through the list as an individual email, or for batches of messages to be collected up into a single digest that is sent out once or twice a day 9or less frequently for low volume lists). If you have opted to receive digests, many of these can be automatically burst into individual messages as they arrive with the next set of option. this doesn't work for every type of message digest though - there are different digest formats. However, it will work with digests from modern list servers, which covers 90% or more of mailing lists.

Then, we have an option to specify an applescript to run on mailing list messages. this opens up a whole range of possibilities! However, the most common use I make of this option is to change the account of list messages, as I get some list traffic in to an alias account whose mail is redirected to one of my real accounts. If I forget, and just 'reply' to one of these messages without setting the correct account for the reply, I will get a bounce-back from the mailing list server who will refuse to deliver my mail because it came from an email address that was not subscribed to the list.

Finally, we have options for the reply behaviour. List can be set up so you r replies go back to the list (to be circulated to all subscribers) or to go back to the sender of the message you are replying to. Lists seem to be fairly evenly split between these two options. this setting in the MLM gives YOU the power to choose what you want to happen, rather than the Listmom (the person who runs the mailing list is invariably known as 'mom').

As you can see, the MLM is a powerful tool for organising list mail as it arrives AND for helping you keep your replies organised as well. Now all you list mail is conveniently organised, lets move on to...

The Junk Mail Filter

Spam (Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE) is the scourge of the internet. Everyone gets spammed at some time (unfortunately). it is a penalty we have to pay to use email.I have a variety of strategies i use to try and keep my spam load to reasonable proportions (maybe another subject for a future blog entry), but no matter what, some spam always finds it's way to me and my Entourage. Again, there is a very useful tool for handling spam. From the 'Tools' menu (again), select 'junk E-mail Protection...' (these instruction apply to Entourage 2004 - in vX it was called 'Junk Mail Filter...' and some of the option I will describe were different or missing).

Here we have the first window for the JMF settings. It's worth pointing out once again that the JMF runs on messages AFTER they have been passed through any MLM entries you have, so Mailing list traffic should never be marked as spam. The four levels are fairly self explanatory. The top level (Exclusive) is really severe, and not really suitable for anyone who is likely to get mail from unexpected addresses. This includes just about anyone using email for business purposes. It could be disastrous for a new customer's email enquiry to be consigned to a junk mail folder just because you hadn't got their email address in your address book. I have found that 'High' is pretty good for me, but, as I said earlier, I have lots of MLM entries and mail rules to handle mail that can be identified, and so avoids the JMF. Mail that the JMF identifies as spam will be moved to the Junk e-mail folder for that account. It won't be automatically deleted before you can check it, so you needn't worry about false positives ('good' mail that is incorrectly marked as spam).

The only other option available in this window is to automatically delete mail from the Junk E-mail Folder after a certain length of time. i settle on 30 days a a good value here - it means I will certainly check the mail in the Junk folder before it gets deleted (I tend to check about every other day) but it will get deleted before too much builds up. If only the poor poster I mentioned at the top of this entry had selected such an entry - he would never have reached the stage at which Entourage refused to open.

Now switch to the 'safe Domains' pane. Here you can define whole domains that are known to be safe. This way, I will never, according to the setting I have in there, have mail marked from btyahoo, symantec etc marked as spam. You odn't have to type the domains into here - if a good mail is ever marked as spam, you can always use the 'not spam' button in the toolbar that appears when a junk mail is selected. This will give you several options - to add the sender to your address book (address book contacts are NEVER marked as spam), to create an MLM entry, to add the domain to the list in this window, or to do nothing else, just 'unjunk' that message alone.

OK, now we have dealt with mail from mailing lists and spam. Let's sort out all the other stuff that comes in...

Mail Rules

Once again, go to the 'Tools' menu and this time select 'rules'. First thing to notice is that there are six different types of mail rule:

To my mind, this is a weakness in Entourage. There is no way to transfer rules from one type of account to another. It must surely be a common occurrence that you want mail from the same person to be handled in the same way, no matter which email address of yours they send their messages to? however, the developers have taken the decision to segregate all the different types of account. There is some justification for this, as not all selection criteria for rules is applicable to all types of account - for example, IMAP messages may only have had the headers downloaded when the rule is applied (this is the default behaviour)

Anyway, this behaviour isn't likely to change in the near future, so we'll just have to live with it. Let's make a new rule. Click on the 'New' button:

Here's new Rule window. It's divided into roughly 4 regions. The first of these is the name of the rule. Call it anything you want, it won't affect how the rule works, so choose a name that will still mean something to you in five years time!

Next we come to the Selection Criteria. You can have lots of criteria, even though there is only one shown by default in a new rule window. The 'execute' pop-up menu determines how these criteria work - either messages that match ALL the criteria will be acted on by the rule, or messages that match ANY ONE of the criteria. So, you can set it so either any messages from 'Fred' OR from 'Bill' will be acted on, or it could be just messages from 'Fred' AND with "photo" in the subject will be acted on.

Now you can set the criteria. Where the pop-up says 'all messages', click on the menu item, and see what options are available. these will vary depending on the type of mail account. When you have selected something other than 'all messages' (which is self explanatory) you are likely to get one or two other settings in the criteria line - usually a comparison operator and a value field, like this:

Add as many criteria as you like. Simply keep clicking on the 'Add Criterion' button above the first line and setting the options appropriately. When you have your selection criteria set up, move on the move on to the next section - the actions. Two are provided as examples, but again, many more are available. You can add to these two, or delete from the list with the 'Add' & 'Remove' buttons. You need to remember that the actions take place in the order you have set them up, so if you copy a message to a new location before you assign a category, the copy will not have that category set. The exception to this is an applescript execution - this is passed off to a different thread, and can take place independently from other actions on the message - either before them or after them.

Finally we come to the last section - what I'll call the rule preferences. These are the last two check boxes in the window. The first one should be checked if you are happy that this rule will be all you need to do with a message - you can then check this box and after this rule has handled a message it will not be passed on to other rules to check against their criteria. All processing is finished. If your rule moves a message to different folder, this option will be checked and greyed out. You cannot pass the message on to other rules if it has been moved. This is unfortunately a limitation caused partly by Entourages mail system and partly by mail standards, but it means that a message move must be arranged to be the last rule you want to run on a message. Finally we come to the 'Enabled' check box. If this box is checked (and it is repeated in the list of rules in the Rules window) then any messages that get past the MLM and the JMF and any preceding rules will be checked against the criteria of this rule. If the box is unchecked, the rule will not run automatically as messages arrive, but can be run against a bunch of selected messaged using the 'apply rule' menu item in the 'Message' menu or the contextual menu you get if you control-click (right-click) on a message. This can be useful on occasions, when you want to automate a sequence of operations, but want to apply them only to messages _you_ select. Set up a rule with the selection criterion 'All Messages', set the actions to your chosen sequence of operations, and uncheck the 'Active' button. You can now run these actions simply by selecting some messages and manually running the rule as described above.

Hopefully, you will now have a a bunch of MLM entries, the JMF set up and a collection of rules as well. All your mail will be filtered into different mail folders as it arrives. Apart from keeping stuff nice and organised (which helps when you are looking for that particular message off Auntie Mabel) it means that _you_ can be more organised and can prioritise the way ion which you read your maIL - mail from your boss can be checked before anything else, because it will all be in the one place, and easily identified because his folder will be highlighted in bold whenever these is unread mail in it.

This was a longer post than normal, but I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave you comments by using the links below. I try to answer all comments, and love to hear from you.