59365 - Filters should have triggers

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Currently, the only trigger for a filter is that new mail arrived. A 
trigger is what starts the criteria portion. There should be more triggers for a 
filter. Some that I can think of are:

Time and date(s) such as Monday 17th at 6:00 or every Monday at 6:00.
When a message is placed in a specific folder
When the user starts the program
When the user closes the program
When new mail arrives
When the user navigates to a specific folder

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

CC:ing jglick and laurel.  

Comment 2

[Keyser Sose]

marking NEW so someone can decide whether or not this is worth the time or
energy to do.

Comment 3

[Alec Flett]

oops, reassigning to new filter owner

Comment 4

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Also look at bug 59368, and bug 59341

Comment 5

[scottputterman]

reassigning to naving

Comment 6

[Julien Pierre]

I think another "trigger" should be a manual selection of messages by the user.
I think this is a very useful that is sorely missing from the e-mail client.
Having used it in other programs I miss it doubly.

Take the following situation :
You just subscribed to a mailing list.
You download your mail from POP. A whole bunch of messages arrive.
You add the filter to your filter list.
You highlight all your unread messages in your inbox and right-click "process
with filters" (possibly selecting a group of filters : inbound filters, outbound
filters, etc) . Automatically your messages get sorted the way you want. You
also see that your filter is working correctly without having to wait for more
messages from the list.

Comment 7

[Julien Pierre]

It would be really nice if there was a schedule for this RFE.

Comment 8

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 181254 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Vaclav Dvorak]

Can someone explain what this would be good for? Also, explain on WHAT messages
a filter would operate, if it was set to trigger at a specific time, or on
program startup/shutdown, or when user navigates to a folder? Surely not on all
messages - that would be time-consuming, and also useless, because all messages
were once new and thus processed by filters then.

I understand that you may want to re-filter old mail when you change your
filters or add a new one, but for that, there now is Tools->Run Filters on
Selected Folder, which is also a solution for jpierre's comment 6.

Comment 10

[Vaclav Dvorak]

*** Bug 187081 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 197362 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Jörg Skottke]

Manually running the filters is not really an option if you have a large amount
of folders. Automating this is a major timesave.

Comment 13

[Vaclav Dvorak]

So, what you really want is "Run Filters on All Folders", or "Run Filters on
Folders..." with selection of any number of folders?

Comment 14

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Vaclav: No. Please be sure to read an entire bug carefully before making an
assumption of what a bug is about. Especially if the bug is very old, and you
plan on making changes to the bug status (which I realize you haven't done,
yet). You aren't expected to know what a bug is about, but you are expected to
realize what a bug is about if you make changes to it. I'm saying this because I
believe you have bug-editing permissions. If I'm wrong, then please forgive me.
Regardless, you probably could have figured out what the bug is about and what
comment #12 was referring to if you read everyting carefully.

The original description for this bug explains what is wanted. Triggers are
criteria for running a filter automatically based on some condition being meant.
That is what outlook has.

Comment 15

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 16

[william drescher]

In addition to the scenarios mentioned before I would add this as a common use:
deleting older messages.

I want to be able to have Mozilla mail automatically remove old messages  from
my sent and trash folders.  To do this I would need to be able to attach a
filter to a folder (see below) and have the system run the filter at a set time
(because I leave Moz open most of the time) and, possibly, at startup or shutdown.

The reason for attaching a filter to a folder is that I want to delete trash
after 90 days and sent after 180 days.  Even if I want to run the filters
manually I either have to enable/disable the 90 and 180 day filters so that
everything is not filtered out at 90 days.

A much less acceptable way to do this would be to have criteria for folder name
and account name and then search all folders, but that would be very slow.

possible could be done with js ( Bug 59341 )

Comment 17

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 224540 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Howard Chu]

(In reply to comment #16)
> In addition to the scenarios mentioned before I would add this as a common use:
> deleting older messages.

I agree, I do this now but I have to remember to run the filters manually.

I think there should be a selector for filter triggers. And I think filters need
to be associated with individual folders (bug 294632, bug 257415), and by
default a folder-specific filter should trigger whenever a message lands in that
folder.

The "when new mail arrives" trigger is just a special case of "when message
lands in a folder" and I don't think it needs to have its own selector.

I can't picture a use case for "when user navigates to a folder." The user
experience for that would be nasty: "Oh, it looks like I have some new messages
in this folder. <click> hey, where'd they all go???"

If the idea of the "navigate" trigger is to fire off housekeeping filters, I
think that's better done by a time/date specifier. Otherwise, just filtering
when messages land in the filter would be more appropriate.

Program start/program end... I'm skeptical. Program start is probably OK.
Running anything upon closing the program is a feature I would never use; when I
click "Exit" I do not want to wait while a ton of disk activity suddenly occurs,
I want the program to disappear, immediately. Also, I usually leave my computer
on 24x7, and Mozilla is running the whole time anyway. The only time I exit the
program is to shutdown, and I don't like anything that slows down my shutdown
sequence. Again - I'm shutting down my laptop 'cause I'm going somewhere, and I
need to pack up and go. Not wait around a few minutes until some silly program
tells me it's OK to go...

re: triggering on manual selection of messages, I think bug 174801 is more
appropriate.

So anyway, I think the only triggers that are interesting are scheduling filters
to run at a time interval (every month, every Monday at 5pm, etc...), and
filters on a folder that run whenever a message lands in the folder. Having
these two features would satisfy a lot of needs.

Comment 19

[John David Galt]

*** Bug 262738 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[Miguel Delapaz]

*** Bug 315130 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 21

[roberto]

(In reply to comment #16)
> In addition to the scenarios mentioned before I would add this as a common use:
> deleting older messages.

i think that this done:

right click on the folder -> properties -> retention police -> delete messages more than XXX days old

Comment 22

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 26

[David :Bienvenu]

this would be very nice to have, but marking wanted- based on our new criteria - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Release_Driving

Comment 27

[:aceman]

Many of the comments were off topic and have separate bugs. But the original description still holds and is not implemented. However, there are many bugs filed for the individual "triggers".

Should this be changed to a meta bug with those other bugs as dependencies, or should they all be duped here?
I am also not sure the dupes of "filters per folder" really belong here.