Email Rules

Rules handle mail from a sender automatically. Here's how to create a rule, add text matching, control the order rules run in, and review what fired.

What a rule does

Rules tell WonderMail what to do with new mail from a specific sender. Pick where it goes — Archive, Spam, Trash or Leave in Inbox — and optionally a label (labels are unavailable for Trash and Spam).

A fourth action, Apply Label (Keep in Inbox), labels the mail but leaves it in your Inbox. It is created in Settings → Rules. (This replaces the old Auto-Routes tab.)

Rules apply in WonderMail and are mirrored to the account the mail arrived on: archiving archives it in Gmail or Outlook too, and an account label is applied there as well (global labels stay in WonderMail only).

Creating a rule

• Right-click any email in the list, or press Q with an email selected.
• Archive and Delete rules apply instantly; Apply Label opens a small editor to pick the label.
• The label box in the rule editor searches plainly: type any part of a label name, or the account it belongs to, and only labels actually containing that text are listed, closest matches first. Clearing the box brings the full list back; scroll it with a mouse wheel, trackpad, touch, or the arrow keys.
• When the label box first opens, your 3 most recently selected labels appear at the top under Recent so repeat choices are one click away; typing a search hides that section.

Rules normally affect only mail that arrives afterwards — including a new message that lands in a conversation you already have, so a daily report that keeps replying into one long thread is still handled. WonderMail checks the actual received message when a mail provider omits the sender from its conversation summary, so sender rules still apply (a snoozed conversation, a Follow-Up or a To-Do is never moved by a rule). Importing older account history preserves mailbox moves and labels already made in WonderMail, so an older provider snapshot cannot put rule-filed mail back in the Inbox. Your rules also run on older mail as it is imported for the first time, so an email pulled in from months ago is filed and labelled just like new mail (conversations already in WonderMail are never moved by this). You can tick "Apply to Inbox emails now" or "Apply to ALL emails now" when creating a rule to run it once over stored mail (Sent, Trash, Spam, snoozed, Future Box, To-Do, drafts, scheduled sends and follow-ups are always skipped). "Apply to ALL emails now" requires "Preview matches" first so you can see the full count; the Undo button in the toast can reverse a batch. In the right-click menu, a tick beside an action means a rule with that action already exists for the sender — it does not mean the email you right-clicked was handled by it, so an email that arrived before you made the rule stays where it is.

Pro Tip: always click "Preview matches" before ticking "Apply to ALL emails now". The count tells you instantly whether the rule is too broad — and the toast's Undo can reverse the whole batch if it was.

Limiting a rule to one of your addresses

Under From there is an optional To box. Leave it empty (it shows "Any recipient") and the rule applies however the mail was addressed. Type one of your addresses — for example info@mortgagelogic.news — and the rule only acts when that address appears in the email's To or Cc list. This is the way to catch vacation auto-replies to a newsletter you send from a specific address without touching mail sent to your other addresses. Existing rules are unaffected: they keep applying to any recipient. Both the From and To boxes suggest addresses as you type, and your own connected account addresses appear at the top of the list when they match. Use the up and down arrows and press Enter to pick one. The From address is always editable, even when you started the rule from an email, so you can correct or replace the sender before saving.

Text matching

A rule can be limited by keywords: choose contains or does not contain, any (OR) or all (AND) of the keywords, and whether to look in the subject only or the subject plus preview text. Keyword matching ignores capitalization and matches inside longer words, so "invoice" also matches "invoices". Hyphens, dashes, underscores and spaces are treated as the same separator, so "auto-renewal" also matches "auto renewal" and vice versa, but word order still matters; each line is one keyword or phrase. Tick "Also match plurals" on a rule to treat renewal/renewals, box/boxes and policy/policies as the same word; it is on for new rules and off on rules created before this option existed. Wrap a keyword in quotes, like ""auto-renew"", to match those exact characters only — separators are not swapped and plurals are never folded for quoted keywords.

Tick "Only if no one has replied" to make a rule skip a conversation once someone has replied. Repeat emails from the same sender still count, so a daily report that keeps landing in the same conversation is still handled; a message from anyone else, or one you sent, ends it. The option is off unless you tick it, and it works with or without keywords.

Which rule wins

If a sender is blocked (SpamCrusher), spam always wins. Otherwise a Delete rule wins over Archive, which wins over a label-only rule.

A sender can have several rules. They are checked top to bottom in Settings → Rules and the first rule whose keywords match wins — when a sender has several rules, the small number in front of each shows that check order. A rule with no keyword condition matches everything, so keep it at the bottom as the fallback. A rule can also apply to every sender — tick "Any sender" in the rule editor; sender-specific rules always win over an any-sender rule. The From box also accepts a bare domain like bmo.com — the rule then catches every address at that domain and its subdomains (for example strategy.bmo.com); an exact-address rule wins over a domain rule, which wins over an any-sender rule.

When you open the rule editor for a sender who already has rules, a notice at the top lists them in the order they run, each with an Edit link. Creating another rule never overwrites a rule that has keywords; it is added after the existing ones.

If the rule you are creating would repeat one the sender already has — same destination, same label, and either no keyword condition or exactly the same keywords — WonderMail asks you to confirm when you press "Create rule". Choose Cancel to go back and change it, or "Create anyway" to add it regardless. Editing an existing rule never triggers this.

Pro Tip: give a noisy sender two rules — a keyword rule on top that keeps the messages you care about in the Inbox, and a catch-all rule underneath that archives the rest.

Reviewing rules (Trace this email)

Right-click any email and choose "Trace this email…" (it replaces the old "Check Rules…") to see why that email is where it is. The window answers four questions. "Why is this email in this box/label?" names the box and any labels it carries and the newest thing that moved it — a move you made in WonderMail, a sync from your mail provider or another app signed in to the same mailbox, a rule, a SpamCrusher block, or a snooze. In Follow-Ups, it separately names Follow-Ups as the current WonderMail view and the conversation's underlying mailbox and labels, because a reminder does not move the conversation out of Sent, Inbox, or its other mailbox. "Recent movements" lists the last five recorded changes with the date, the boxes it moved between, and what caused each one. "What rules were applied to this email?" says which rules have actually acted on this email and when, then lists every rule that can act on that sender — its exact-address rules first, then any domain rules that match the sender — in the order they run. Any-sender rules are listed only when they would act on the email you right-clicked. Each rule's parts are shown on separate lines (From, Subject, To, Condition, Action), and a keyword rule reads "contains ALL of: …" or "contains ANY of: …" so you can see whether every keyword is required. Each rule shows whether it applies to this email, or why it was skipped (for example "someone has already replied in this conversation" or "the subject does not contain …"), and when it last acted on this email or "never to this email". You can Edit a rule, move it up or down, or delete it from there, and "Manage all rules" opens Settings → Rules. If the sender was blocked with SpamCrusher, that block is shown first as a Mark as Spam entry, because a block always wins over your rules. "Who is the email provider?" names the connected mailbox the email arrived in, its provider (Google, Microsoft or an IMAP server), and the provider's own labels or folders on the conversation so you can check that WonderMail and the provider agree. The last section shows the Email ID for the individual email, the Conversation ID for the whole thread, and the provider's own message ID; click any of them to copy it. "Copy trace" copies the entire report in one click. The number in a circle beside "Trace this email…" is how many rules can act on that email. Email you sent yourself has no circle and no rule list, because rules only act on mail that arrives from other people — for those emails the "Rule for …" line is hidden too.

Review, edit, or delete rules in Settings → Rules. Use the search box at the top of the list to find rules containing any text — a sender, domain, label, keyword, recipient, or action. Every time a rule fires it is recorded in Settings → Activity, with the sender, action, and email subject, so you can debug unexpected routing.

Pro Tip: when mail lands somewhere unexpected, open Settings → Activity. It names the exact rule that fired, which is faster than reading through your rule list.