How filing works

Domain grouping, filing modes, the reply-safe delay and resolution order.

Sortfully files mail by the organisation that sent it, worked out from the sender's email domain. This page explains how it decides where each message goes.

Grouping by domain

Every sender address has a domain — the part after the @. Sortfully groups senders by the root organisation domain, so every alias and subdomain from one organisation files together:

ceo@acme.com, billing@acme.com and noreply@mail.acme.com all file into one acme folder.
news@thetimes.co.uk files into thetimes — the .co.uk public suffix is stripped to leave the organisation name.

This naming uses the Public Suffix List, the same data browsers use to tell acme.com (one organisation) apart from github.io (a shared hosting suffix, where you.github.io is its own organisation). You never have to maintain this list — it's built in.

Filing modes: Move, Tag, or Both

Each rule can file mail in one of three ways:

Move — the message leaves your Inbox and goes into a clean subfolder.
Tag — the message stays in your Inbox but gets a coloured category label, so you can scan or filter by organisation without losing the single-inbox view.
Both — the message is tagged and moved.

You set a default mode during onboarding and can change it per rule at any time on the Mappings page. All Sortfully categories share one colour, which you pick in Settings.

The reply-safe delay

By default, Sortfully only files a message after you've read it — and then waits a short, configurable delay before moving it. This does two things:

Your phone notifications still open the message, because unread mail stays in the Inbox.
You get a moment to reply or act before the message disappears into a folder.

You can change the delay (or switch to filing the instant mail arrives) per mailbox in Settings. The delay has a minimum floor so a message is never whisked away mid-reply.

Resolution order — what wins when rules overlap

When more than one rule could apply to a message, Sortfully uses a fixed priority — the first match wins, top to bottom:

Pinned message — anything you chose to keep is never moved.
Moved by your own Outlook rule — left alone, so your rules win.
Excluded sender — stays in your Inbox.
Specific address — e.g. a rule for ceo@acme.com.
Domain rule — e.g. a rule for acme.com.
Auto folder — the folder derived from the sender's domain.

If two rules of the same kind could match, the older rule wins. This means a narrow rule (one address) always beats a broad one (a whole domain), and your manual choices always beat the automatic ones.

Real time vs. catching up

New mail — Sortfully is notified as soon as it arrives: Microsoft pushes a real-time notification for personal mailboxes, and shared mailboxes are checked on a regular polling sweep. When a message is then filed follows your read-first setting — by default once you've read it (plus the reply-safe delay), or the moment it arrives if you've switched read-first off.
Existing mail is handled by backlog cleanup, which paces itself so Microsoft never throttles your mailbox.