Thanks to all the good people here that explained filtering to me last
night. I found that my mental image of how filters worked was
completely different from reality. In order to understand them I came
up with an analogy that may or may not be completely accurate. Feel
free to adjust, expand, discard, edit or ignore. Maybe this will help
someone else.
I've always pictured my email filter as like a little robot that goes
to the mailbox and retrieves a handful of mail and sorts it for me. I
tell him what boxes are available and the robot checks the mail and
puts it in the corresponding boxes in obeyance of the rules I told him to
use. ie: mail from xyz@somewhere goes in the JOKES box because that's
all I ever get from him. Mail that isn't addressed to me goes in the
trash can. Any mail that is left over from all this sorting is put in
the inbox for me to manually sort and drag to the appropriate place.
I kept stacking more and more fields and parameters to filter and
never had a failure that I knew of. If I told it I didn't ever want
to see mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED], I didn't. It was gone and
never came back. IF a friend wrote using a new address I just added
that address to mail that went into the box that person's mail was
supposed to go to. Simple and very easy
I thought this is how it worked. Maybe I was wrong.
>From what I learned last night it seems this is a better analogy:
There are actually as many robots as filters I've created. Each of
these little robots examine all the mail to see if any of it suits
what their defined job. If so, they grab it. If not they leave it in the
inbox for another robot (filter) to examine. After all the robots
have examined all the mail whatever left over is still in the inbox
for me to manually sort. If, for some reason, two robots see mail that
fits their programming they both try to take it but in the end leave
it in the inbox for me to puzzle over why it didn't go where I told it
to. This has been a great source of frustration.
The difference in views is striking. Thank you for the
enlightenment.
J Belk
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