1392704 - Need capability to group filter match criteria

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 297852

(Thunderbird :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Santos]

When adding message filter rules, there is a nice dialogue to choose the match criteria and action.  Radio buttons allow you to specify how your matching criteria should be processed: all of the criteria, any of the criteria or just all messages with no criteria.

My challenge is that I am subscribed to many mailing lists, the linux kernel, wine-dev, gcc, gcc-patches, etc., etc.  I have one rule that looks for messages sent To or Cc me as well as one of these lists and it highlights it and stops processing.  Later, I process all of these other messages and send them into their respective folders (which is the only way to manage getting 500+ emails per day).

The problem is that I have some 100-odd filter rules.  A great many of these could be consolidated if I could match AND and OR criteria in their usual algebraic form.  For instance, if I could create a rule that says:

If an email contains
To or Cc "[e-mail]"
AND (From, To, Cc or Bcc "[e-mail]"
     OR From, To, Cc or Bcc "[e-mail]"
     OR From, To, Cc or Bcc "[e-mail]"
     OR From, To, Cc or Bcc "[e-mail]"
... etc.
)

Then I could group a great many of my rules into single rules.  I haven't dug into thunderbird, so I don't know how these are represented internally, but maybe there is a reasonable way to expose the internal representation to provide this functionality.

If you really wanted to make us programmers happy, then let us use perl-compatible regular expressions! :)

Thanks,
Daniel

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Great idea. Sadly any development of new features is done my volunteers and if you can't muster anyone, the enhancement request won't be actioned. Also, this and/or processing is deeply entrenched in the code base, so what you're asking for can't be done on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/ may help. But it does need an update for current versions of Thunderbird.