Inbox

by Glenn Delahoy
(C) Copyright 2004-2005. All rights reserved.

How It Works

Inbox acts like a middle man; fetching, collating and reviewing your mail before you download it to your mail client. With the optional filtering, you can aggressively deal with unwanted mail saving you time and precious bandwidth. This is particularly useful if you have a slow dial-up account. You no longer need to sit around while your mail client downloads hundreds of unwanted emails.

Mail Collection

Inbox connects to each of your uplink accounts and downloads mail to one of two private folders for each account.

Filtering

You define what type of mail you want to receive and what type of mail you want to reject based on the contents of various sections of the mail. Any mail you reject will be deleted directly on the uplink server and is never downloaded. All other mail is downloaded. Of the mail that is downloaded, any mail you have accepted is placed in the inbox folder ready for collection by your client. Any mail that is neither accepted nor rejected is placed in the quarantine folder. You can then browse the mail and create new filters to either accept or reject the mail.

Auto Reply and Redirection

When email is received and accepted, you have the option of redirecting it to either other Inbox accounts or other email addresses. By switching on the Name Redirection option you can effectively have many Inbox accounts attached to a single email address. You can also mark your account as away and Inbox will automatically reply to all accepted email with a configurable message.

Client Collection

Redirect your mail client to collect mail from the Inbox POP3 server. Mail that you have accepted is downloaded into your client. Mail that you have rejected is trashed and is not available to your client. Mail that is quarantined is also not available to your client and remains in quarantine until it is either accepted or rejected by new filters.

This is the usual configuration and looks something like this:

                              +-----------+
                              |  uplink   | rejected
                              |  account  |--------->-------- deleted
                              +-----+-----+
                                    |
                              +-----+-----+
                              |  filter   |
                              +-----+-----+
                      accepted      |   unknown
                +--------<----------+------>-----+
                |                                |
  redirect  +---+---+                     +------+-----+          +---+---+
+----<------+ inbox |---------<-----------| quarantine |----->----| trash |
            +---+---+          accepted   +------+-----+ rejected +---+---+
                |
                |
            +---+---+
            | client|
            +-------+

This configuration is duplicated for each account and is the default when you first install Inbox. So what you'll notice happening initially is that all of your mail will end up in the quarantine folder. You'll now browse the quarantine folder for each account, decide whether to accept or reject each email and create the appropriate filters. Subsequent mail that matches these filters will be dealt with automatically. This means initially you'll probably spend more than a few minutes a day creating filters but over time you'll notice that most of the work is being done for you and the time you spend should come down to a couple of minutes or less a day.

Note that Inbox can be configured a number of different ways. If your requirements differ from this basic description then read ahead to the Configuration Scenarios section and the Redirection Scenarios section to see how it can be set up to work differently.