On Wednesday, September 20, 2000, jbelk wrote:
> 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'm glad it's clearer to you, but I don't like the analogy of multiple
robots who examine the email. I prefer to think of it this way, using
moving messages to folders to illustrate.
I have one robot - the sorting robot. It's not too bright, but then it's
only a computer. When an e-mail message arrives, my robot looks at it,
then looks at the first order I've left for it - the first rule in my
Incoming Mail filter. "Does this message match this order?" it asks
itself, thankfully not bothering me with such questions. If the answer
is "Yes", it plops the message in the folder I've designated. Then, it
scurries off to get the next message.
If the answer is "No", the robot sighs and looks at the second rule. If
there is a match, it plops the message in the folder I've designated for
that rule, then scurries off to get the next message. If not, the robot
looks at the next rule and so on until it's either deposited the message
in a folder or discovered that the message does not match any of the
rules, in which case, thoroughly annoyed, it leaves the message in the
InBox, then slouches off to get the next message.
Once my robot has plopped a message in a folder, it forgets about it. It
doesn't bother looking through the rest of the rules for something else
about the message that might match, unless I've explicitly told it to
"continue processing" after finding a match. But, rules intended only to
sort messages into a folder rarely need to be processed further, for
which my robot is very grateful. It's a pretty lazy robot, in addition
to being not too bright, but it gets the job done without pestering me,
as long as my rules are crystal clear and logical. When they are not, I
find e-mail from my boss in the Trash bin - not where I need it to go,
much as I may want it to.
--
Paula Ford
The Bat! 1.46c (reg)
Windows 95 4.0 Build 950
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