359260 - Filters: Make Personality (Account and/or Identity) action

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Matt Dudziak]

The Penelope Filters need the ability to set the Personality / Account / Identity of incoming messages.

Note: For local messages, Thunderbird (and currently Penelope) inserts an additional header to the message which is likely used to keep track of the account to use for replies. This headers is:

X-Account-Key: 

For example:
X-Account-Key: account-7

Per Steve, the use of account numbers to keep track of Personality is not optimal. This is a topic for a separate discussion, and likely a different bug.

Comment 1

[Frank]

Related to bug 264770 ?

Comment 2

[David Morrison]

Certainly needs to be able to set the personality. Probably needs to do it for both incoming and outgoing messages. (I have a couple of personalities that use the same address but have other characteristics different.)

Comment 3

[Nigel]

Just a vote for this! The Personality feature is key to Eudora, Apple Mail just doesn't cut it.

Comment 4

[Carlos Hetche]

agreed!! 
Make personality in the Filter section is essentian for our business to run.
Pleaes see my post here: http://eudorabb.qualcomm.com/showthread.php?t=10417&page=3&pp=10

Comment 5

[Carlos Hetche]

just wanted to add to the comment above: my post was under nickname: polishruben

Comment 6

[James]

If I understand this bug from the description, this is what it is supposed to do?  :

When an incoming email arrives, it should go through any filters, and if it fails to match a filter, it should go to the default mailbox for that personality.

Currently I have to always keep the filter for the "Personality Mailbox" last. Even when I create a new filter I need to make sure it goes before the "Personality Mailbox" Filter

Comment 7

[Carlos Hetche]

James, in a reply to your post from today - I would say " not necessarily" - the Personality Filter, as you called it, doesn't necessarily direct the emails to the "correct mailboxes" – to do this you can use filter “Transfer To” – as in the current version of Eudora

The filter "Make Personality" – changes in the incoming e-mail the field: TO.

Just like that: if an e-mail from “[e-mail]” is coming to the address “[e-mail]”. The filters are set-up so then EVERYTHING that comes to "[e-mail]" will be converted to personality "[e-mail]". So from now on, in my mailbox the e-mail is from “[e-mail]” to "[e-mail] " and not anymore to "[e-mail]"

I hope this is clear enough. If not, please post reply I will try to explain it in details.

Comment 8

[Scott R]

(In reply to comment #6)
James, 

This is a more accurate explanation of the filter "Make Personality" IMNSHO :

The purpose of assigning a "Personality" aka "Persona" in current Eudora is to give eudora attributes to use when you reply to the message and to identify the message origin's mail account. 

When you reply to a selected message the assigned "persona" (X-persona header) for a message will determine the selected value in "From:" field selection list in the compose window. 

When you use the "queue" button the "Persona" will determine the smtp server and connection method. 

The other purpose of "Persona" is to determine what pop3/imap server and connection method when you select the "check mail".

Mailbox destination is not implied by just assigning or changing "Persona". You can as ,Carlos wrote, write a filter rule to move messages to a mailbox based on "Persona".

The assigned "Persona" before any filters are processed indicates which mail server the message came from. This is useful when you have more than one email server that supplies messages (eg gmail and yahoo servers) 

So X-Account-Key: is similar to X-Persona header in current Eudora for the filter rules you could write. I believe that that is the scope of this request.
The other mentioned functionality of "Persona" is not in scope of this request. My comments are based on Eudora Win platform. 

Comment 9

[James]

(In reply to comment #8)
>

I have filters for each personality.  The issue I am having is, 
Say personality_A joins a maling list (which he does frequently, so does B, & C). 
I then create a Filter for that Personality (A,B, or C).
     Make Filter
I then need to go into the filters dialog box, and move that filter BEFORE the personality.

(It would be a different bug, but I would like a way to: Set mail for a personality to ultimately go to that personality's mailbox, OR set a priority (i.e alway last) for certain filters (i.e. the personality). 

Comment 10

[Matt Dudziak]

Assigning to Thunderbird as this is not unique to Penelope.

Comment 11

[mikes]

I vote for this, but this is more than just filters. With Eudora, when a personality ("Identity" in TB terms) was set, it inserted an "X-Persona:" header. Then, when acting on that message (reply, etc.), it used that header setting to determine the From:, smtp, etc. settings to use.

It seems like some versions of TB add an "X-Account-Key:" header, but the value is set to something of strictly local significance, making it useless for IMAP access from multiple clients (accountX may be different on different clients). I'm not even sure it it's still used, my install of TB 9.0.1 doesn't seem to add it.

It's important that any solution be able to act on a similar header. That way, one could have, say, a server side procmail recipe which added the appropriate header, no local filters actions required to set the Identity (although they should be supported), and it works across multiple TB clients. 

I'd suggest simply using Eudora's "X-Persona: <personality name>" header, which should seamlessly maintain compatibility with existing Eudora clients. This would require supporting a shortname for Identities. Eudora would choke on a "X-Persona: My Name <[e-mail]>" header, as < and > aren't allowed in Personality names.