266836 - Download headers only; download message bodies on demand; improve user-defined and junk mail filters

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dmitry Grigoriev]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

It would be nice feature reducing spam traffic. It may look like this:

1. Option "Auto-download message bodies": "never" / "from senders on my
addressbook only"  / "always".

2. Option "Auto-download attachments": "never" / "from senders on my addressbook
only" / "always" (if POP3 supports separate attachment downloads)

3. Message bodies can be downloaded on demand, when user clicks message header.
But when "junk" icon is clicked and option "When i manually mark messages as
junk" is set to "Move them to the junk folder", message body is not dowloaded,
thus we reduce spam traffic.

4. If message header information is sufficient for user-defined message filters
or junk mail filters to process, message should be processed. In the case of
junk mail, this also reduces spam traffic.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:




They say it's implemented in russian mail client "The Bat!" (see
http://www.ritlabs.com/en/). I never used it and don't know any details about
it; but they say that:
1) "Server-side filters" are VERY helpful in reducing spam traffic;
2) last program versions are VERY buggy. :)

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

For POP, headers-only is already a feature in Moz 1.7 and TB 0.8.  (You did not 
specify which Thunderbird build you are using.)  Marking this bug WorksForMe.

See bug 249445, bug 249452, bug 249361.  Please test thoroughly before filing 
any additional bugs against the feature.


(In reply to comment #0)
> It would be nice feature reducing spam traffic. It may look like this:
> 
> 1. Option "Auto-download message bodies": "never" / "from senders on my
> addressbook only"  / "always".

To handle the "in my address book" case, you can create a filter for sender in 
address book, using the "Download message body" action.  This was bug 185184.


> 2. Option "Auto-download attachments": "never" / "from senders on my
> addressbook only" / "always" (if POP3 supports separate attachment downloads)

POP3 does not support separate attachment downloads.

> 3. Message bodies can be downloaded on demand, when user clicks message
> header.
> But when "junk" icon is clicked and option "When i manually mark messages as
> junk" is set to "Move them to the junk folder", message body is not dowloaded,
> thus we reduce spam traffic.

I haven't been testing this much.  Download-on-demand occurs by clicking a link 
within the body displayed for the header-only message, or by using the "Get 
selected messages" or "Get flagged messages" menu items (under File | Offline, 
or in Moz MailNews, in the context menu for the thread pane) -- or, again, the 
filter action Download Message Body.

I don't get enough spam to have been testing this enough; I did file bug 248742 
but haven't continued trying to reproduce it.

 
> 4. If message header information is sufficient for user-defined message
> filters or junk mail filters to process, message should be processed.
> In the case of junk mail, this also reduces spam traffic.

The filters run on the downloaded headers, and again on the downloaded message.
Again, I don't know how the junk case works, as far as deleting the message on 
the server without downloading the body.