426755 - Allow users to supply regular expressions to be ignored when sorting

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Matthias Schroder]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.0.12) Gecko/20080211 Red Hat/1.5.0.12-0.10.el4 Firefox/1.5.0.12 pango-text
Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.12 (20080211)

Our mailserver redirects spam into a dedicated folder. Regularly I check that folder for false positives before cleaning it. To check I always sort by siubject, since that way I can recognise frequent spam quite fast (15 mails with identical subject). Two issues reduce the efficiency of that method:

1) many mailing lists add a spam tag to the subject. Now the mails appear in several places: original order, order with one spam tag, order with two spam tages, order with.... so my wetware pattern matching takes much longer.

2) subject lines of spam now often start a single character followed by whitespace. Same effect on pattern matching as above.

The negative impact on the pattern matching could be avoided if I had the option to specify regular expressions that are ignored during sorting [even better: would not be displayed], e.g. '*SPAM*', '^\w\s+'. The expressions to ignore should be selectable per folder.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. get lots of spam (very easy today)
2. move them to spacial folder
3. check for false positives
Actual Results:  
I find very similar subject lines in many distinct places, and wish somebody would beat up these f&*(%$$#( spammers.

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird groups all similar subjects together, and I can recognise and delete them with little effort :)

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

xref bug 213567, but even if that gets fixed, your use case sounds a bit exotic:)

Comment 2

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The options we currently have in our filters are pretty deep and allow regular expression alike settings, but with an intuitive UI.
I don't think we want to support writing regular expressions at all.