Since switching from the HEP mail server
to the UCL Live email
service you may have noticed an increase
in spam (some marked as ‘{SPAM?}’ by
the UCL spam filter) and other types of email into your inbox.
This is most likely because your email is
no longer being
additionally filtered via the HEP email server,
where you had a
file called .procmailrc containing some rules each of your
emails would have been
checked
against, and filtered according to any conditions it met before
it was downloaded by your email client.
You can view your old .procmailrc file by logging into the HEP linux cluster and typing.
cat /unix/mail/users/insert your hep username here/.procmailrc
A sample of what a .procmailrc file may
contain can be seen
below. Although the code may seem a little cryptic,
you can probably recognise
phrases it looks for (in Upper or lower case), and whether it
redirects any
email
which meets a particular condition to a specific folder (instead
of your inbox), or to “null”
(essentially deleting it).
Unfortunately you cannot transfer your .procmailrc file to the new UCL Live email service.
Luckily, you are able to create a new set of conditional rules on the UCL Live email server.
You do this by logging into UCL Live (aka
Office 365, aka what we used to call webmail) rather
than by setting rules in
your mail client (which may not always successfully update
"server-side" rules or
may only work locally on that device).
Creating the rules directly upon the
server has the advantage that the email will be filtered
before you download it,
so that spam doesn’t reach an inbox on any of the devices you
use to
read email (alleviating the need to
replicate local mail client rules on every device / pc / laptop
/ tablet /
phone).
To start simply creating rules to redirect spam or filter
your incoming email to different folders on the Live mail
server:
Log in here:
http://outlook.com/live.ucl.ac.uk
Using your UCL username (ucap???) appended
with @live.ucl.ac.uk, as below:
You may get a short wait message as the
Outlook Web App loads.
Click on the “cog” icon to the right of
your name:
From the Options page, click “organize
email” (their US spelling, not mine) from the left-hand column.
(You will see “Inbox
rules” highlighted at the top of the page indicating you are in
this section.)
[In the picture below you can see several
rules I have already set up.
These rules filter any emails meeting certain
conditions
neatly into category-related mail folders on the Live
mail server, BEFORE my email clients
download any email to any device.
Thus, only email which does not get flagged /
match those conditions filtered upon, will be downloaded to my
“inbox” folder on any
device. (A nice advantage if you regularly check your email on a
smartphone,
where
important or useful emails in your inbox can otherwise get quickly
swamped by spam or auto-generated email).
Redirected emails go directly into
the folder you have diverted them to, and will appear as new,
unread email in
these folders, or in the case of my spam rule, to my
“deleted” folder.]
To create a rule:
Click on the + sign,
then select “Create a
new rule for arriving messages..” from the drop-down menu.
Then type the words or phrases
that you wish the rule to act upon into
the pop-up box (syntax must be exact here,
unlike the name
of the rule above which can be loosely named as that text isn’t
part of the
search phrase).
Press + to add the condition.
Select the action you wish the filter to
take if the condition you have just specified is matched.
(If the action is moving to a folder,
you may have to create the folder first to ensure it appears in
the list).
You may create more rules and even make
rules with cumulative conditions if you wish.
When you’re finished, click on your name
near
the top of the page to see the option to sign out.
There is more information about the UCL
Live mail service
here:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/mail/live/outlook/owa
[Any updates or corrections to t.hoare@ucl.ac.uk
– Last update 4/3/2014]