Sort emails from TeamForge automatically

When you are involved in a lot of activities on your TeamForge site, you can start receiving many emails from project members and administrators. To save time, you can configure your email application to sort these emails automatically.

For example, you are automatically emailed whenever someone comments on an artifact that you created. You may also want to join the monitoring lists of items you are interested in, and other team members can add you to the monitoring list of items they create. All of these things can add up to a good number of emails after you have been on a project for a while.

Your email program, such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, looks for the X-headers in incoming email messages and acts on them according to your instructions.

  1. In your email client, create a message filter.
    • In Mozilla Thunderbird, click Tools > Message Filters.
    • In Microsoft Outlook, click Tools > Rules and Alerts.
  2. Specify the type of information you want to filter. For example:
    • Use X-TeamForge-ProjectId to identify the project that the incoming email is related to.
    • Use X-TeamForge-FolderId to identify messages related to a specific tracker or document folder.
    • Use X-TeamForge-AssignedTo to flag tasks or artifacts that are assigned to you.
    • Use X-TeamForge-CommitPath to watch for commits path in a Subversion repository where you are working.
    • Use X-TeamForge-PlanningFolder to watch for artifacts to be added to or removed from a planning folder you are working with.
  3. Tell your email program what to do with the messages with the X-header that you specified. For example:
    • Automatically move emails into a special "To Do" folder if they are about tracker items assigned to you.
    • Color emails red if they are about commits to the Subversion repository path you specified.
    • Forward all build-related announcements to your mobile phone for reviewing later.
You can use as many X-headers as you need. If you have set them up judiciously, this can decrease the amount of time you need to work through your incoming email.