168524 - filter after the fact: problems with space based filters on netscape mail servers

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Filters, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

filter after the fact:  problems with space based filters on netscape mail 
servers

I hit his when I did filter after the fact.  I have a filter rule for 

if subject has "    " filter to spam.  It moved all my email from my inbox to 
my SPAM folder.

search has the same problem.

david, can you elaborate?

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

The problem is that filter after the fact uses SEARCH to match the filter terms,
and on our NMS, spaces are ignored in searches (according to jgmyers, this is
because you have to ignores spaces in Japanese, so we all suffer!). So, a search
like "" matches everything.

I tried out UW and Cyrus servers; they work fine. I'm not sure how to handle
this. I could change the filter after the fact code to ignore filters that have
search terms with just spaces, on imap folders (or even check for our imap
server, I guess). Or, do something similar in the imap protocol back end - just
remove those terms.

We could also take the search hits and try to verify them if we have a search
term with all spaces. All of these seem like a hack to deal with a very
unfortunate combination of a useful mail filter (subject contains "     ") and
an unfortunate behaviour of our server.

Comment 2

[Alec Flett]

I think we should just drop the search terms that consist of only spaces, when
doing filter-after-the-fact. I don't think we should drop the whole filter though.

Comment 3

[timeless]

:-( but I like this filter.

i'd go for finding/creating test messages to sanity check server side searches,
if  they fail the sanity check then automatically run a client side search.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

fixed by change in bug 278052, which makes all filters after the fact run offline