312153 - Support filtering RSS by "Website"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Josh Watson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1

The RSS messages appear to have a Website: header field.

I don't want to see nytimes select messages from Google News, I'm not a
subscriber and it annoys me to click a link and get "pay us money...".

So, I set a filter on the "Website" field (which I had to define myself) for:

Match Any
("Website") ("Contains" also tried "Begins With") ("http://select.nytimes.com/")

then
Delete message
I also tried: 
Move to Trash

These rules have no effect, whether on incoming messages or run on my google
news folder.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Define Website as a field
2. set a filter on the "Website" field for RSS account
3. Run Filter
Actual Results:  
Nowt. Nothing is logged to the filter log either.

Expected Results:  
Selected messages are removed.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

RSS items are constructed by Thunderbird from the feed.  If you look at the 
source, there is no "Website:" header.  The "Website:" field in the envelope 
appears to be initialized from the item's "Message-Id:" header -- so try 
defining that header instead, and filtering on it.

Note that some filter actions do not work on RSS (bug 264382).

Comment 2

[Josh Watson]

Thanks Mike, using Content-Base instead of Website makes a good workaround
(along with using Move to Trash instead of Delete to get rid of it).

However, I'm from a technical background, I just don't know much about RSS. This
behaviour will definitely confuse a non-technical user. It appears to the user
that an RSS message has a Website field, so they may well expect Thunderbird to
be able to filter on it.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This behaviour will definitely confuse a non-technical user. It appears to
> the user that an RSS message has a Website field, so they may well expect
> Thunderbird to be able to filter on it.

Fair enough; let's make this an enhancement request.  I doubt this will change 
to make a "Website" header, but the there could easily be a special "website" 
criterion for RSS filtering.

Comment 5

[alta88]

For a custom header, the actual header name is used in the display (label attribute) and must also be used for the search and be specific (case, ascii per header naming rfc). Changing this design is not likely as it's not trivial.

The need for Content-Base to search for a feed's website link is documented here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs