All these features and more can be yours with a little creative hacking of Domino's existing mail rule system. This article will demonstrate how to make these changes so that you too can create rules like those depicted in Figure A.

FIGURE A


There are many custom mail rule possibilities. Roll over picture for a larger image.

If you are unfamiliar with mail rules see http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200310/00001117001.html before continuing.

An important caution
Mail rules in both the Domino Directory and the user mail template rely on the same design elements. The following changes will work in both places, though this article will concentrate on the Domino Directory. Don't forget about design inheritance. If you make changes to either names.nsf or a user mail file, make sure you either add the changes to the inherited template or turn off inheritance in the database's properties so your changes are not lost. The following changes have been tested on Domino 6.01 and 6.5 but should run on any Domino 6 or later system.

What is a mail rule?
It turns out that a mail rule is really a two-part Domino formula stored in a field named $FilterFormula on the Mailrule form. The first part of the formula is a SELECT statement that chooses which messages to act on and the second part of the formula is a @Do function that contains actions to take on matching messages.

Imagine (not hard) that you need a mail rule to deal with messages containing a certain bodily-enhancement medication, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


This mail rule tells Domino to hold messages that have a certain medication as the subject. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As an example, the mail rule shown above has a $FilterFormula field with the following value: