217052 - Mail filters not shareable across Windows user accounts

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Eric Scouten]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: Mozilla 0.2a (20030813)

I use two different Windows user accounts (work, personal) on the same laptop. 
Both accounts read my personal e-mail account, using the same data folder 
(C:/Thunderbird/Personal). Filters defined when I'm in one Windows user 
account don't work when I move to the other account.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a filter that moves mail to a folder.
2. Log off Windows.
3. Log into Windows, using a different user account.
4. Relaunch Thunderbird.
5. Receive mail using same Thunderbird data folder, same filters.

Actual Results:  
Error: The filter "___" was disabled because the folder "___" could not be 
found. (I may be munging the vocabulary; the dialog isn't in front of me now.)

Expected Results:  
Mail should have been moved to the folder I had previously specified (which, 
BTW, had *not* moved).

Workaround (very painful): Edit the filter after receiving the dialog, choose 
the desired folder again.

Note that I have to do this EVERY time I switch between Windows user accounts 
(i.e. twice per day, going from home to work & vice versa).

Comment 1

[Eric Scouten]

Build identifier should have been Thunderbird 0.2a, not Mozilla 0.2a

Comment 2

[wkearney99]

This is probably because the filters are setup in two different places.  One set
of the data is in the msgfilterrules.dat file and if you use custom headers also
in the prefs.js file.

It seems like tbird might be having a problem in that your different windows
accounts are using different disk locations for the profile data.  Are you
certain that you don't have different files in different
%userprofile%\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles folders?  Go check.  It's
likely that while you might have moved the mail folders you haven't moved (and
configured tbird to use) the actual profiles.  See if that's the case.  

Comment 3

[Robert Rothenberg]

See Bug 129883, about sharing filters across email accounts, which is related (though I'd not call this a duplicate of it).

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

On rereading, I don't think this is a valid bug.
Does anyone still see this problem?

Comment 5

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I can't imagine fixing this bug specifically, but I could see it being a side effect of better account syncing. Imagine a method for syncing accounts across multiple devices as a feature, with optional choice of what is synced (similar to FF sync). A separate profile, which is the request here, would be a variant of that. "Filter definitions" could be one of the choices, and then if we added global (multi-account filters) then syncing them would accomplish the goals.

Pretty far fetched I admit.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Agree with comment 5