[Design] conditional e-mail filtering

[Philip Trauring]

I've posted about e-mail filtering before, and the hope that chandler  
will support some advanced filtering options, and this is one more  
possibility I'd like to suggest.

Obviously spam is a problem we all have to deal with, and although  
spam filters have come along quite a bit in the past few years, they  
can't cover all possibilities. One area of spam that I've noticed  
spam filters have a lot of trouble with is phishing-type e-mails  
addressed from popular sites like ebay, amazon, etc. Obviously if you  
want e-mails from these sites (and have filters to organize them)  
then some of the phishing e-mails will make it through. Some spam  
filters have started to address this issue by looking for phishing- 
style links, but this is a difficult task.

Ebay, in response to these phishing e-mails, has started putting  
one's ebay id in all of the e-mails they send, so you know it's  
coming from them. This is a great idea. I would imagine other sites  
will follow this, since spammers in theory cannot know one's id on a  
given site (assuming the site doesn't show e-mail addresses or that  
it hasn't been hacked).

This opens up a great way to eliminate phishing e-mails from these  
types of sites. For ebay, for example, I would set up a filter that  
would look for e-mails coming from ebay.com - and then check if my  
username is included in the e-mail - if my username is not included  
in the text, then the e-mail is sent to the trash. If the username is  
found, then a different action can be triggered.

In fact this can be generalized to allow other functionality. For  
example, you add one or more filters that must be matched (i.e. from  
address includes ebay.com) and then you add a conditional set of  
filters (i.e. text contains my username) and then specify actions  
that are carried out for both the true (i.e. filter into an 'ebay'  
folder) and false (i.e. move to trash) possibilities of the second  
set. The true/false option might be compared to an 'if/then/else'  
function.

You might also allow multiple conditional responses. This would be  
useful for sites that send out multiple mailing lists from the same  
generic e-mail address. I have some mailing lists I get from the same  
site, where the e-mail address is always the same and they don't even  
put the mailing list title in the subject. In this case I could  
create the initial requirement being the e-mail address and then  
search for specific text in each e-mail to match up with each mailing  
list, and then filter accordingly.

That's it,

Philip Trauring