Note: This weekly post serves to answer questions submitted via InfoTech Tuesday and the K-State Zimbra website; update the K-State community with new project information; and detail Zimbra features.

A powerful feature of K-State Zimbra e-mail is the ability to create mail filters.  Mail filters help organize your Inbox  by automatically moving incoming mail to a folder, forwarding it to another e-mail address, or tagging it.

By creating mail filters in the K-State Zimbra web client, you are creating them at the server level. This means that if you use multiple clients to access your mail, you do not have to replicate your filters in each client.

With K-State Zimbra, you can access your e-mail in a variety of ways.  You can use the K-State Zimbra web client, a local mail client such as Thunderbird or Mac Mail, or a mobile device such as a BlackBerry or an iPhone.


With the K-State Zimbra mail filters, each incoming message is tested against your filter rules at the time the mail is delivered, and the filter conditions are applied to matching messages at this time.  This is an improvement over K-State’s current WebMail system (webmail.ksu.edu) and many local mail clients, as the filters with those are not applied until you access your mail with that client.

Mail filters can test against conditions such as:

  • Specific addresses in the “From”, “To”, or “CC”
  • Words or character strings in the subject or body of the e-mail message
  • The presence or absence of file attachments

You can also set “not” as a negative condition. For example, you can specify that any messages not containing a particular word be filtered.

Go to the K-State Zimbra website to read frequently asked questions and to send comments to the K-State Zimbra project team.