Using Filters to Sort Incoming Email
| Creating a Filter | Changing Filter Order | Editing and Deleting Filters | Additional Tips |
Changing Filter Order
If you create more than one filter, the order of your filters can be very important. When Yahoo! Mail receives an incoming message for your account, it tries to match the message to your filters in the order listed on the Filters page. If you don’t arrange your filters in the optimal order, Yahoo! Mail may redirect messages to different folders than the ones you expect.
Yahoo! Mail first applies the filter at the top of your list (Filter 1). If the message matches Filter 1’s rule, Yahoo! Mail sends the message to the destination folder that Filter 1 specifies. In that case, Yahoo! Mail doesn’t consider any of the other filters in your list.
If the message doesn’t match Filter 1, Yahoo! Mail tries the second filter in the list and so on. It continues until it either finds a filter that matches or it runs out of filters to try. If no filter matches an incoming message, Yahoo! Mail delivers the message to your Inbox folder.
Consider the following example: Suppose an important piece of mail is sent from somebody@companyname.com to your account, and you have two simple filters set up:
Company filter
If From contains companyname.com
then deliver to: Work
Somebody filter
If From begins with somebody@
then deliver to: Friends
If the Company filter is listed before the Somebody filter, Yahoo! Mail compares the message to the Company filter first. Since the message contains companyname.com in the From field (somebody@companyname.com), the message is placed in the Work folder.
On the other hand, if the Somebody filter is above the Company filter, Yahoo! Mail compares the message sent from somebody@company.com to the Somebody filter first. Because the From condition of the Somebody filter (somebody@) matches the message’s From field, the message is directed to the Friends folder and not to the Work folder.
For the best results, put your narrowest (most restrictive) filters at the top of your list and your broadest (least restrictive) filters at the bottom.
(More Details)
Here’s How
Go to your Yahoo! Mail Filters page. (Remind me how.)
Your filters are listed the order in which Yahoo! Mail tries to apply them.
To move a filter up or down in the ordered list, select the filter, then click the Move Filter Up or Move Filter Down button at the top of the page.
The list refreshes, showing the filter in its new position.
What’s Next
It’s easy to modify or delete a filter once you’ve created it.
Words to Know
- Filter: a set of rules that Yahoo! Mail uses to direct an incoming message to a particular folder.
- Folder: a container that holds individual elements specific to the context; for example, email messages in Yahoo! Mail.