Health caution "Always use filters"

4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?

Filters are a great time saver if you are constantly receiving emails that contain a similar message thread, from a group of friends or work associates, or other pattern forming expressions. The function is very similar to a GREP search (global regular expression print), it just looks for regular patterns in text, in this case to sort emails into presorted folders. (I use GREP search in Adobe InDesign, a graphic design tool.)
Although the filters in email software are very limited in their search function they can still handle most of the sorting work before I have to intervene. My normal work flow is to set sub folders that I can manage through Thunderbird (yes it's a tacky name but its a good email package, they should have a Australian version named CockyChatter - I must register that name, it sounds cool) and use the "create filter from message" button to set up parameters. Depending on whom I'm communicating with, the sub folders are arranged by group titles such as organisations, events, special interest, things to do, and then there's one for all the rest - emails that are one-offs. To presort the emails into the folders I use searches that contain the sender's name, subject, info that might be contained in the body of the email and so on. Once the email threads are finished I can easily archive the folder.

Generally, the types of filters one may use greatly depends on one's imagination, so be creative and think about it. They are a fabulous time saver.

Also anything that falls outside the filters in my case are usually spam, so it's an efficient way to manage something that can get into an awful mess very quickly.