1844993 - Profile msgFilterRules for all mail accounts in a profile

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 34973

(Thunderbird :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Steps to reproduce: I have 8 email accounts in TB and when I need to add a new filter rule I have to do this for each account in a redundant way. My accounts represent real life roles and I use filters to tag messages from suppliers, authorities, peers, and flag new spam phrases as junk, which are the same for most accounts in real life.

Actual results:

Actual results: I am living with 8 different msgFilterRules.dat files which should basically contain the same rules but actually are a patchwork of the typical flaws of redundant structures, and I am suffering from Thunderbird since 20 years for causing all the extra work and deficiency to me.

Expected results:

Expected behavour: I would prefer to maintain one single filter ruleset for all accounts within a profile. The rules shall be triggered to run for the account in focus instantly for arriving emails, and for all folders of all accounts by schedule (e.g. every 30 minutes), and on demand (by key shortcut / button / menue).

This is a new way of thinking of filters for TB development, not a duplicate thread, while it is a also new approach to solve also these issues which are untouched since 20 years:
bug 229493
bug 166842

This concept is based on the long-time awareness that 'user' filters would follow more the user's logic and have major advantages over by-account filters:

• The demand to categorize messages originates from the owner / user of a TB profile rather than being a specific property of a mailbox / account / alias.
• Most rules depend on external information like SenderEmail, Subject and Message content and the action is similar.
• Most account specific filter rules (if any) can be applied on any account with no problem because the RecipientEmail is known.

Only relative folder paths need to be rewritten and server names need to be droped/extracted (refer to bug #229493), but this effort should be taken once by the programmers to bring much benefit to thousands of users.

I believe the concept of account based filters was somehow taken from Netscape Communicator in the previous millenium and was questioned infrequent although many lacks have been posted and some have been amended in the narrow scope of this concept. How about the idea to leave the account based msgFilterRules.dat untouched for their proponents, and in parallel write a profileMsgFilterRules solution for those who wait for enhancements since over 20 years?

Comment 1

[Thilo [:ThiloteE]]

I Agree:

Having 8 different msgFilterRules.dat files is hard to manage. --> Trying to unify filter rules within a single file outside of the mails and feeds folder for easier synchronisation, import and export as well as avoiding the need to have duplicate filters for multiple accounts could be good.

I Disagree:

Most of my filters are in fact account specific. I don't know, if account specific filters are rare and I am the odd one out, or if they are common, but I do have a problem with people assuming such is the case without pointing to empirical data. With regard to efficiency, I think it is better not having to execute every single filter on every single inbox/folder. So, if there is any work done to implement this, please also somehow retain the ability to have account specific filters.

How Syncthing does it:

Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/) is a file synchronisation software, which allows to use regex to exclude files and folders from being synchronised, which they call "ignore patterns". Those rules are written into .stignore files. The interesting thing is, they have come up with an implementation that allows to include .stignore files into other .stignore files. Like this: #include .stglobalignore. So both approaches could be combined for backwards compatibility: Thunderbird could have a main global msgFilterRules.dat, while retaining the filter rules within the accounts and just point towards those account specific filter rules in older TB profiles. I guess the Filters UI would need to be adapted to somehow include a "space" for global filter rules.

Of course, while the above described approach tailored after Syncthing might work, it still leaves us with many msgFilterRules.dat files, which is what we want to avoid. So, if this is supposed to be done "right", existing filters would have to be converted to new syntax and moved to a global msgFilterRules.dat file.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to [:chris] from comment #0)

Expected behavour: I would prefer to maintain one single filter ruleset for all accounts within a profile.

This is bug 34973

The rules shall be triggered to run for the account in focus instantly for arriving emails, and for all folders of all accounts by schedule (e.g. every 30 minutes), and on demand (by key shortcut / button / menue).

That is essentially what filters are already capable of.

(In reply to Thilo [:ThiloteE] from comment #1)

I Disagree:

Most of my filters are in fact account specific. ... So, if there is any work done to implement this, please also somehow retain the ability to have account specific filters.

Yes, that would be necessary