272374 - Message filter using "subject begins with" actually works as "subject contains" against imap after the fact with "Run Now"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Tom Reahard]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

If a mail filter has a rule "subject begins with XXX" and "XXX" is in the middle
of the subject such as "My mail XXX subject", not at the beginning, it will
still produce a match.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. No special steps - just create a mail filter "subject begins with XXX"
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
All emails with a subject containing the desired match anywhere in the subject
produces a match.

Comment 1

[nelson]

I have also verified this bug. IMHO it effects the proper use of the filters
option as we can cannot determine how reliable the filters are and have to
manually sift through the mail.

Comment 2

[Jeongkyu Kim]

It works fine for me in local folder (1.0.6 & 20050922 on XP SP2).

Hi Tom (and nelson),
I wonder if this issue happened to you in IMAP folder.

Comment 3

[Oleg Semenov]

Yes, it happens in IMAP folders.

Comment 4

[Jeongkyu Kim]

IMAP server only supports 'contains' and 'doesn't contain' for subject. And
thunderbird does not have any consideration for another operators such as
'begins with' (see EncodeImapTerm() in
mailnews/base/search/src/nsMsgSearchAdapter.cpp ).

The search UI for IMAP folder (right click on IMAP folder -> Search Messages...)
reflects this limitation correctly, but message filters UI does not. Not to
confuse users, we need to implement IMAP specific filters UI.

jeongkyu -> QA,
Would someone in QA evaluate severity of this issue? This issue seems to be
critical to IMAP users.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

filters that are run on incoming messages do not use the imap server to evaluate
the search criteria. Only filters that run after the fact use search on the imap
server. Are you running filters manually?

Comment 6

[Jeongkyu Kim]

(In reply to comment #5)
> filters that are run on incoming messages do not use the imap server to evaluate
> the search criteria. Only filters that run after the fact use search on the imap
> server. Are you running filters manually?

Hi David,

You're correct. To reproduce the issue, I ran the test filter manually. Let me
check on the case of incomming message now.

Comment 7

[Jeongkyu Kim]

It works fine for me with incoming messages. Then my suggestion of IMAP specific
UI is not good. :-) Considering the fact that this issue happens only for manual
running of IMAP filters, what would be a good solution?

Comment 8

[David :Bienvenu]

well, I could switch running imap filters after the fact to run locally. And at
this point, I'm pretty convinced that's what I should do. I don't even remember
why I thought it was such a good idea to run the search on the server :-) Other
than that you can do things like body search filters, which you can't do
locally, unless you've configured the folder for offline use.

Comment 9

[Oleg Semenov]

Please fix the manual filter run so that it would not use IMAP search but would
download all the headers and run the filters locally, just like it happens with
the normal filter run on mail arrival. If you would make a separate IMAP filter
UI with "contains" only, please at least make it an option, or otherwise this
would leave Thunderbird without any useable filtering for IMAP.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

David in comment #8:
> well, I could switch running imap filters after the fact to run locally. And at
> this point, I'm pretty convinced that's what I should do. 

this applies to both tools > run filters on folder, and tools > filters, correct?

Comment 11

[David :Bienvenu]

yes, it applies to both - the underlying code is the same.

Comment 12

[Matt Dudziak]

Using a Trunk build (Eudora 8.0.0b3 actually) this works fine for me. A filter that says:

Subject begins with foo
Tag message [some_tag]

has the following effect:

Message with Subject 'foo and then something' is filtered (tag applied) when message arrives, when filters are applied manually (Tools->Run filters on folder) and when the filter is highlighted in the Message Filters window and 'Run Now' is clicked.

Message with Subject 'something and then foo then something' is NOT filtered in any of the cases mentioned above.

I'm going to mark this 'Works for me'