Feature Guide

Messages

The Messages tab shows which messages have been processed by Filtered and which folder they have been routed to. You can quickly browse using search by sender or subject and filter by folder. You can also sort each column.

The Messages tab isn’t meant to replace your inbox client for browsing email, however, you can view individual messages.

Senders

The Senders tab makes it easy for you to browse senders and see which are trained to route to specific folders and which are untrained.

The three sub-tabs are there to help speed browsing. Recent senders shows those that may need to be trained to properly route your recent email. The Untrained sub-tab makes it easy to find senders that you haven’t yet directed to specific folders. Sorting Untrained senders by # of Messages makes it easy to identify the senders you frequently receive email from. Trained senders shows those that you’ve already trained.

The Update Sender page lets you set the destination folder for mail from this sender. If you’re using the advanced module, you can exclude senders from quiet hours, trigger smartphone notifications using the Pushover application and even automatically expire messages after a certain time. Automated expiration is useful for marketing emails or disposable things like email parking receipts.

The bottom of the Update Sender page lists recent messages that you’ve received from the sender which can be helpful  in identifying messages that you might want to route.

Folders

The Folders tab lets you add, update, delete and train folders in your accounts. I recommend starting small with just the default folders that Filtered initializes:

• Inbox
• +Filtering/Bulk
• +Filtering/Review
• +Filtering/Secure
• +Filtering/Zap

You can use the Train folder option to have Filtered look at the contents of your folders and set sender routing based on the messages that it finds there. If you’ve already been routing messages to folders, this is an easy way to train Filtered according to your past efforts.

Update folder properties allows you to turn folders on or off for training and on or off for digests. If training is on, Filtered will regularly scan them for drag and drop trainings. If digests are on, a summary of messages routed to the folders will be listed in message digests.

Accounts

The Accounts tab is where you add and configure your email accounts. Filtered has been tested with Gmail accounts and FastMail accounts but it may work fine with other IMAP accounts. You can read more about setting up your accounts in Getting Started.

You can also manually process the review folder which will immediately scan the review folder and move any messages from senders that are trained to be routed to other folders. It’s also a helpful way to see a list of untrained senders for each account.

Account -> Your Settings

The account menu on the right offers a drop down for user settings which allow you to configure system-wide preferences.

You can choose whether to receive message digests and how frequently to receive them. e.g. every hour, every day, every week.

You can set up Pushover tokens and device settings for receiving alerts when messages come in from specific senders or with specific keywords. Learn about the Pushover app here.

You can turn on automatic inbox cleaning which will archive messages out of your inbox after a specific period of time e.g. 1 day, a week, or more. This is a way of enforcing a clean inbox.

You can also turn on whitelisting so that unknown senders receive a challenge email requesting they verify their identity. If they click on the verification email link, their message will be quickly moved to your inbox. This is an excellent way of reducing the impact of unsolicited email on your inbox.

Alert Keywords

Add keywords that will be matched against sender email addresses and subject fields to send alert notifications to your phone.

Quiet Hours

Choose periods to turn off email delivery and digest deliveries. e.g. No email on weekdays after 9 pm or on Weekends. Individual senders can be excluded from quiet hours in sender settings.

Recipients

Using a catch-all domain can make it easier to register for websites with anonymized email addresses. e.g. sign up for a jcrew catalog with jcrew@yourdomain.com. This makes it more difficult for companies to data mine with your email address. It’s helpful if yourdomain.com does not directly identify you and keeps an anonymous whois record.

The Recipients table tracks frequent recipient mailboxes so that you can more easily route these recipients to specific folders.

Secure Messages

Any messages routed to or dropped in the secure folder will automatically be encrypted and stored on the Filtered server; then deleted from your IMAP account – which could be easily browsed by the NSA.

You can view encrypted messages through the Filtered web user interface when you are signed in.

This blog post described the Secure Folder capability in more detail.

Other Resources

There is a Google Group for Community Technical Support for Filtered. Ask questions and get technical support. This is especially useful if you want to fork the codebase and expand its capabilities or if you’re just having trouble installing the software.

There is a UserVoice forum for posting feature requests and rating other people’s requests. Feature work on Filtered will be prioritized in part according to the most popular requests.