A filter can contain one or more conditions. For example, if someone sends you email messages from more than one email address and you want to direct all messages from the person into one folder, you can create one filter that has two conditions, one for each email address, and one action to move the email messages to the same folder.
The order of the conditions is not important. You can select whether the email message must match all conditions or just meet any one of the listed conditions. You can also use a negative condition. For example, you can filter an email message that does not contain a particular word. Filter conditions are not case-sensitive.
A filter condition can be based on the following:
• Specific email addresses in the From, To, or Cc fields
• Email messages that are under or over a specific size
• Dates
• Presence or absence of file attachments
• Words in the message subject or body
• Calendar invitation
Filtering Using Any Versus All
Conditions within a filter rule can be grouped using Any or All. The use of these terms is similar to the "AND" versus "OR" type searches described under the Search feature, with Any being OR and All being AND.
If you select Any when defining conditions for a new filter rule, then a message that meets any one of the conditions is considered a match. However, if you select All, every condition specified in that filter rule must apply in order for that message to match the filter.
Filtering Using Contains, Matches, and Is options
Three of the comparison methods for filter conditions are Contains, Matches pattern, and Matches Exactly. These options appear for some items such as the subject line.
• Contains means that the specified line must contain, somewhere within it, the specified string. For example, specifying that the subject line contains "bananas" would match both "Cooking with bananas" and "Bananas for breakfast".
• Matches pattern means that the specified line must match the specified string, which includes wildcards. For example, specifying " bana*" would match "banana" and "banana tree but not "free bananas".
• Is means that the specified line must exactly match the specified string, with no wildcards or substitutions. For example, specifying that the subject line must match "bananas" would only match "bananas" and not "Banana", "My bananas", or "Bananas?
