1700 Martin Luther King Jr Way

Many people use the mail filters (also called mail rules) in their email client software to automatically file incoming mail into separate folder. This would allow all incoming email from a mailing list (for example) to be stored together in the same folder. But what if you often use 2 different computers to check mail, or if you have an iPhone, for example? You would need to setup mail filters on each computer individually. The iPhone doesn’t even support mail filtering.

One of the best new features of our new mail system is it’s ability to filter mail on the server, without your email client software involved. Server side message filtering can be setup using the webmail interface.

Before setting up a new filter, we recommend setting up your email client to use IMAP (as opposed to POP). Filters will still work with POP accounts, but anything that is filtered out of the INBOX will not be downloaded to your computer. Tips on converting from POP to IMAP can be seen here

You can create new mail folders from within webmail, or from your own IMAP client software. Once you have the mail folders you need to filter incoming mail, then:

• Login into webmail
• Click the Filters link at the top of the page.
• Click the “Add a New Rule” button.

This is where you define how a message is to be identified. It can work with any header, such as the email address of the sender, or a string of text in the Subject. Then, you click the “Move message into” button and tell the server where you want these messages filed.

There is also an easy way to create a new mail filter right from an email message. If you open an email from within webmail, you will see in the top a link to “Create Filter”

Clicking “from” (for example) will create a new mail filter to act on all incoming messages from this same sender. Then you can specify which mail folder you want the messages filed into.

The Apple iPhone is a remarkable device - In addition to all of its other features, it has perhaps the best implementation of mobile email in a cell phone ever.

Here are some tips on setting up your iPhone to work well with our mail server.

First off, we recommend converting the email client software on your computer to use IMAP instead of POP. IMAP will allow you to keep the messages you see from your email client software the same as you see on your iPhone. Click here for tips on converting.

If you use Apple’s email client (Mail) on a Macintosh, then setting up your iPhone is a snap- when you sync your iPhone to your Mac, then all of your email account setting can be transferred over. You may still need to change the outgoing server settings, however. If you are using smtp.lmi.net as your outgoing server on your Mac, this server will not work to send mail from the iPhone, because that server will only relay your mail if you are connected to the LMi network.

If you are not using Apple Mail, or just want to setup the account manually, here’s how to do it (using iPhone software 2.1)

• From the iPhone main page, select Settings.
• Choose settings for Mail, Contact, Calendars
• For a new account, click Add Account, then “Other”
• Enter your Name, Email address, password, and a description if different from the email address
• Click Save.
• At the next screen, select IMAP at the top, the for host name use mail.lmi.net
• Your User Name is the mail server login. If your address was “frankie@lmi.net”, then the User Name would be “frankie”.
• For Outgoing Mail Server, use mail.lmi.net, with the same login and password as for incoming server.
• The iPhone will try connecting with SSL, and it should succeed. If so, your iPhone is ready to go!

Note: The iPhone comes with an SMTP server setup for the AT&T wireless network. This server will relay your outgoing email only if you are connecting over a cellular link, but not over a Wi-Fi connection.

IMAP offers several advantages (and some disadvantages) to POP when it comes to getting your email off of our server. Please refer to another posting for more on this.

If you decide to make the switch in your local email client software, here are steps you need to take

In your email client software, open the account settings and create a new IMAP account. You can’t simply change a POP account into IMAP, you need to create a new account.
After the IMAP account has been created, you will need to either delete the old POP account, or just prevent it from checking for new email. If you decide to delete the account, be aware that in many email clients, removing an account will also delete all the mail associated with that account. Be sure to either move the old Inbox and Sent Mail folder to a local folder on your hard disk, or copy it to the new Inbox and Sent Mail folders on the IMAP server.

If you want to keep the old POP account setup in your email client software, be sure to prevent it from checking for new mail. Here’s how to do this with various popular email clients:

Thunderbird

• Select Account Settings from the Tools menu.
• You should see your account listed on the left. Click  Server Settings under your account, and UN-check both “Check for new messages at startup” and “Check for new messages ever __ minutes”

Outlook Express (or Windows Mail under Vista)

• Select Accounts from the Tools menu.
• Double-click on you account to access the settings for that account.
• In the “General” tab, Uncheck the box that says “Include this account when receiving mail…”
• Click the Apply button, then OK.

Apple Mail

• Select Preferences under the Mail menu
• Click the Accounts icon along the top if it is not already selected.
• Click your account in the list on the left, it it is not already selected
• Click the Advanced tab
• Uncheck the box that says “Include when automatically checking for new mail”
• Close the Preferences window and save changes when prompted.

“Mail” is the standard email client application that comes with OS X. The following instructions were written for Mail version 3.4, but are applicable to any version of Mail since OS X 10.4 came out.

Open the Mail application. If you have never opened it before, it will automatically open the New Account assistant. Otherwise, select “New Account” from the File menu.

Fill in your name, email address and password, then click Continue…

Our server supports both POP and IMAP connections. If you are unsure what to choose, read this.

For the sake of this example, we’ll select IMAP. If you choose POP, the process is the same.

The description can be anything you wish. The Incoming Mail Server is mail.lmi.net for both POP and IMAP connections.

Fill in your server User Name and Password, then click Continue..

We recommend using SSL security, so your password is encrpted before sending over the net. Use Password authentication. Click Continue..

Our outgoing server is the same as the incoming (mail.lmi.net). Authentication is not required if you are connecting to the LMi network, but if you will ever being using your computer outside our network, we recommend just turning Authentication on. Use the same User Name and Password as Incoming mail. Click Continue…

Again, we recommend using SSL security for outgoing email, since your email password is being sent.

Click Continue and you will see a summary of everything you have done. One more click and you’re done!

You can have the mail server send an email to anyone sending you mail an announcement that you will be away from your email. The sender will only receive one email per week, regardless of how many emails they send you.

Here’s how to set it up:

• Login in https://webmail.lmi.net with your email username and password
• Click the Filters link at the top of the page.
• Click the “Add a New Rule” button.
• Click in the left-most pull down menu under condition. It says “Header”- change this to “All”.
• Click the “Less…” button to remove the unnecessary second rule.
• In the Action box below, click the button for Vacation.
• You will see you email address listed. Make sure this is the actual address you receive email from. Correct it if not. If this mailbox receives mail from multiple email addresses, you must list each one, separated by a comma (and no spaces).
• Type in the message you want people to get when they sent you email, then click “Add New Rule”. You should be back in the Filters list, where you should see a message that says “Successfully added new rule.”
• That’s it! Your vacation auto-responder is in effect.
• When you return from vacation, go back to the Filters page, edit the vacation rule, and then click the “Disable this rule” box at the bottom of the page. This way when you next want to enable vacation mode, you don’t need to recreate the rule. Just uncheck the Disable box, and edit the outgoing message as appropriate.

Here is a screenshot showing a completed vacation message filter