292967 - no way to filter on mbox "From " line

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Tom Metro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: version 1.0.2 (20050317)

First I'll say that this bug is probably only of interest to users of movemail,
and thus may not warrant much developer attention.

Thunderbird's message filters allow you to create rules that operate on any
RFC822 message header, but the "From " message separator line is technically not
a header, yet it can contain information that is useful for filtering.

(See http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/mbox.html for documentation on the format of
the separator line. The second component on the line is the sender envelope
email address. Unfortunately the address is replaced with "-" on messages
retrieved via POP3 (I assume because the server doesn't provide the envelop
information to Thunderbird), and the line isn't even present on messages
obtained via IMAP (as expected, because they aren't stored in local mailboxes
that require the separator).)

Knowing the envelope sender address is extremely useful information when sorting
mailing list messages. Sometimes the problem can be worked around using other
headers, such as "Sender:", and some MTAs will add a "Return-Path:" header, but
for some mail setups the consistent way to access the envelope sender address is
by examining the "From " message separator line.

As a work around I tried modifying the relevant condition in msgFilterRules.dat
from:

condition="OR (\"From\",contains,[e-mail])"

to:

condition="OR (\"From \",contains,[e-mail])"

with little expectation of it working, and it produced a warning dialog that the
header contained illegal characters.

It seems what's needed is a pseudo header (like "To or cc" or "Age In Days")
that would enable matching against specifically the "From " message separator
line, or a "smart" match against multiple headers ("Sender:", "Return-Path:",
"From " message separator line), where the first one found is used.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.