601884 - Importing message filters from old Eudora - reference to nonexistent msgFilterRules.dat

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Penelope Graveyard :: Filters, defect)

Description

[Galen Gisler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100722 Eudora/3.0.4

I have a large number of very useful filters that I used with Eudora 6.2.4, and was hoping they would go smoothly into the new Eudora. My filters are not fancy (no involved conditionals, for example), which I see has caused problems for others, so I expected the import to be straightforward. 

My problem seems to be rather simple. In the "Message Filters" window, when I select "Local Folders" in the popup menu, I get the following error message:

"One of your filters uses a custom header that contains an invalid character, such as ':', a non-printable character, a non-ascii character, or an eight-bit ascii character. Please edit the msgFilterRules.dat file, which contains your filters, to remove invalid characters from your custom headers."  

I would of course be glad to edit the msgFilterRules.dat file, but it doesn't seem to exist! I did a Spotlight Search, found zero files; "locate" in the Terminal, likewise. I also looked manually in obvious places like my Eudora Folder (~/Documents/Eudora\ Folder), ~/Library/Thunderbird, ~/Library/Mozilla, ~/Preferences, and I opened up Eudora.app with "Show Package Contents", all to no avail.

Of course I do have the file "Eudora Filters" in my Eudora Folder, but when I open this file with BBEdit, I find it has ":" in almost every filter (e.g. "rule From:rsinc.com"), which according to the error message quoted above is an invalid character. If I had an example of what the msgFilterRules.dat file should look like, I could probably write a script to convert my "Eudora Filters" file to that format.

The filters I have in the "Eudora Filters" file worked correctly the last time I used Eudora 6.2.4, which unfortunately is now over a year ago. I'm anxious to get back to using Eudora, because Apple Mail's filtering system is much harder to deal with.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open Eudora OSE
2.Select Window -> Message Filters from the Menu Bar
3.Select Filters for: -> Local Folders from the Popup Menu
Actual Results:  
The error message: 
"One of your filters uses a custom header that contains an invalid character, such as ':', a non-printable character, a non-ascii character, or an eight-bit ascii character. Please edit the msgFilterRules.dat file, which contains your filters, to remove invalid characters from your custom headers."

Expected Results:  
Either it should have shown me all my local-folder filters, or it should have directed me to an actually existing file that I could edit. Additionally it could have shown me the proper syntax for a filter rules file. It would also have been helpful if it could tell me which filters had incorrect syntax.

Comment 1

[Jeff Beckley]

They would be in ~/Library/Thunderbird (unless you've specified a different location for your profile).  Try this command in terminal:

find ~/Library/Thunderbird -name msgFilterRules.dat

or even the all-encompassing (which will take a long time to complete):

find / -name msgFilterRules.dat

Comment 2

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Penelope didn't see any activity in the vcs for the last 8 years, closing.