415022 - Want "From:" field-matching in filters to ignore quotes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Carl Ponder]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071105 (CK-IBM) Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

I get a message

      From: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>

and ThunderBird shows me a

      [e-mail]

in the "Sender" field of the message-list. I can write a filter that matches

    From      is     "[e-mail]"

but sometimes the same address may come through without the quotes. I don't like having to replicate my filter rules with & without the quotes. Could you make the filter tests ignore quotes in the "From:" comparison? The "Sender" column is smart enough to do this extraction...

Note that I don't want to relax the comparison from "is" to "contains", since I'm trying to avoid spurious matches. I haven't run into a single case where I want the presence of the quotes to determine a different match.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Write a filter using "From is"
2. Get a message where the "Sender:" field has quotes.
3. Get another message where the "Sender:" field doesn't have quotes.

Actual Results:  
Only one of the two messages would match the filter.

Expected Results:  
The quotes should be ignored in the match, so both messages would pass the filter.

Note that the full text of the "From:" field is

    From: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>

yet this matches

    From   is   "[e-mail]"

meaning that the "<[e-mail]>" is ignored. I think this is the right thing to do, but the mess is that the "From:" field of the messages is translated to the "Sender" column of the message list using a rule that is inconsistent with the way a filter would be applied to that same field.

Comment 1

[Carl Ponder]

This relates to 221724, 263342, 288179 and 365379.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away, back June 30)]

Please prefix bug numbers with "bug" to get them auto-linked. Like bug 221724, bug 263342, bug 288179 and bug 365379.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away, back June 30)]

Based on those, bug 273884 seems like the only one really realated.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

That bug is not in his list of 4 potential related bugs. However bug 273884 is about wrong display of "Recipient" and the comments say that Sender is displayed correctly.
The report here is saying Sender has problems with quotes in the filters.

Reporter, does this still exist in Thunderbird 7?

Comment 5

[Carl Ponder]

The problem is still in Thunderbird 8.
I have a message which Thunderbird says is from

       Bank of America

The actual message body says

       From: "Bank of America" <[e-mail]>

I wrote a filter to put messages

       From      is     Bank of America

into a special folder, but it doesn't do anything.
The problem is that "From" is just an artifact of the message list window, there's no "From" field in the message, just "Sender".
The "From" field in the message list window and the "From" field processed by the message filters are both derived from the "Sender" field, but they are not derived the same way, so they don't match.
This problem only happens when the "Sender" field has quotes around it, but this is a quite common case.
I think all you need to do is strip these quotes when you derive the "From" from the "Sender". It can't be that hard, you already do it for the message list window.

Comment 6

[:aceman]

Actually, what do you want to match? The name part in quotes, or the real email address (the part in < >)?

I don't know what is the specification in the Thunderbird filters, which parts are matched against the filter condition.
I'd say it should always be the real address and the "" part should be ignored. But it seems you wish for the "" part to be the only relevant and matched one. That is probably difficult to do without heavy changes and/or new options.

Comment 7

[Carl Ponder]

I want to match the "From" field that is printed in the message-list window.
That's already what it's trying to do, it's just screwing it up by not stripping the quotes.

If you want to match on the real e-nail address, you should add a new match option for this.

Why do you think stripping the quotes from the field would take heavy changes?
Are you looking at the code when you say this?

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Carl, does this stil reproduce for you?

Comment 10

[Carl Ponder]

I found a message that uses the "" convention, tested a filter on it, and it worked.
This is with Thunderbird 102.4.0 (64-bit).
I'll go ahead and close this out; I can re-visit it later if I see problems.