439088 - Message filter does not work for news folders and "tools->run filters on folder" can not be selected.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Mark Harlow]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.14 (20080421)

I created a filter for a USENET NEWS group if subject line contains "wmf" mark the message as read (because Thunderbird does not display wmf file but does display jpg and gif). The filter never works even though there is an entry of the main page: "Thunderbird News" to manage message filters.
Also (maybe because filter do not work) the menu "Tools->run filters on folder" is grayed out and can not be selected to test the filter for that news group.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create filter for news group based on subject line.
2. See if it works
3. Check filter log?
Actual Results:  
Messages with "wmf" in subject line still in list and still marked as unread.

Expected Results:  
Filters should work for each Usenet News group (folder) that the filter is saved with and the tool to test the filter should be selectable and work.

An enhancement request to support wmf files and display them like jpg and gif files.

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

News filtering works for me (If |subject| |contains| |bla|, |Mark As Read| in mozilla.test on news.mozilla.org), using TB 2.0.0.14 on Linux, and has worked for me using Windows for several months.

(In reply to comment #0)
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Create filter for news group based on subject line.
> 2. See if it works
> 3. Check filter log?

What do you mean by "See if it works"? An example, this is how I tested:
Created filter for mozilla.test on news.mozilla.org; unsubscribed and cleared out the msf to not mess TB up. I then resubscribed, get new messages, and saw that the 9 messages containing the subject `bla' were all marked as read, as desired.


> Also (maybe because filter do not work) the menu "Tools->run filters on folder"
> is grayed out and can not be selected to test the filter for that news group.

See bug 178870.

> An enhancement request to support wmf files and display them like jpg and gif
> files.

Please open a new bug for that.

Comment 2

[Mark Harlow]

Attachment: Error popup doing search for subj contains "bla"

Comment 3

[Mark Harlow]

I did same with mozilla.test, added filter subject contains bla -> mark as read, unsubscribe,subscribe again and still messages with "bla" still there unread. I tried doing search for subj contains bla and got error popup (see attachment) about NNTP error xpat not supported and nothing found.
I then selected TB to go offline download the message in mozilla.test, tried the search again now offline and it worked finding 29 messages.
Is maybe the search failure while online the reason the filter does not work in my case?

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Created an attachment (id=325256) [details]
> Error popup doing search for subj contains "bla"

That is quite obviously bug 147884. *goes into shock at discovering that news.mozilla.org doesn't support XPAT, then remembers that it's GigaNews, which explains everything.

(In reply to comment #3)
> I did same with mozilla.test, added filter subject contains bla -> mark as
> read, unsubscribe,subscribe again and still messages with "bla" still there
> unread.

Between unsubscribing and resubscribing, you have to remove the msf file, since that prevents Thunderbird from downloading the headers again and invoking the filters. The path should be C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<only folder>\News\news.mozilla.org\mozilla.test.msf; the '.dat' file is the filter list.

> Is maybe the search failure while online the reason the filter does not work in
> my case?

No. Filter and search uses two different codepaths, at least for the point of failure in this case.

Comment 5

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Does filtering still fail for news.mozilla.org if you follow the steps I described in comment 4?

Comment 6

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO per lack of response to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.