694780 - 'Copy to' action in a newsgroup filter does not work

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Filters, defect)

Description

[Brian]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1

Steps to reproduce:

1) Add a newsserver account. 
2) Set a filter which is (almost) always successful (I used FROM contains '.' or FROM contains'@'), and yes, I did make sure that the filter was activated if either condition was true. The filter action is to copy the messages to a folder under Local Folders. 
3) Subscribe to a newsgroup, set filter logging on. 
4) Download new messages in the newsgroup. 
5) Check the filter log. 


Actual results:

The filter log shows that the filter condition was satisfied and claims that the messages were copied, but nothing appears in the folder to which they should have been copied. 


Expected results:

Self-evidently, the messages SHOULD have been copied, otherwise it makes no sense to allow the user to set a filter to do this. 

As a further quirk, if you subsequently open the filter dialog, and run the exact same filter manually on the downloaded newsgroup, it works, the messages are copied.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

The action to apply to the message is COPY? Didn't you accidentally set it to MOVE, which probably isn't allowed?

Comment 2

[Brian]

No, I didn't accidentally set it to MOVE. I said COPY and I meant COPY. 

If you look at the support mailing list, you'll see that I'm not the only one to have observed this problem.

Comment 3

[Brian]

And incidentally, if MOVE *isn't* allowed, then you can add a second bug - it shouldn't be in the pulldown list in that case.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

That was just my guess, that it is possible MOVE is not allowed, because what sense would it have on a newsgroup. You mention MOVE in the bug title, but then only describe the MOVE, that's why the confusion.

I can test it myself.

Comment 5

[Brian]

I actually said COPY TO or MOVE TO, but then described the process for copying. If you look at the title right at the top of the page, you will see that it specifies COPYING. 

Anyway, this isn't productive. Let me hopefully lay this exchange to rest. 

1) COPY TO does not work when the news is downloaded. It should. It works when you run the filter manually on the newsgroup.

2) You can currently select MOVE TO for a newsgroup filter. It doesn't work. If it's supposed to work (and I agree with you that it's not entirely logical), then that's part of the bug. If it's not supposed to work, then another part of the bug is having MOVE TO in the pulldown list for a newsgroup filter. You shouldn't allow a user to select an invalid action, end of story.

Comment 6

[:aceman]

I do not have "move" in the list of actions to apply in a filter for a newsgroup account. Not on Thunderbird 7. Can you attach a screenshot?

Comment 7

[:aceman]

Are you aware that by default TB does not download full message bodies of the messages, only headers? Did you force downloading full bodies somehow before the filter applies?

Also, do you have the filter set on the newsgroups server level, or on some individual newsgroup? (see for files msgFilterRules.dat or <newsgroupname>.dat in the folder storing the datafiles [see in account settings->server])

Comment 8

[Brian]

Regards the 'move'. I'm sorry, you're correct, I was wrong. Move is not in TB7. My wife has an earlier version of TB, I can only think that I looked in her version. Sorry for the misleading information. 

Regarding your second comment, yes, I know the default action is to download headers only. I believe that I've overridden that (screenshot attached, screenshot.png). 

I also believe that the filter is set at server level, see screenshot2.png.

I've also checked that the msgFilterRules.dat contains the filter as expected, that's attached too.

Comment 9

[Brian]

Attachment: first screenshot

Comment 10

[Brian]

Attachment: second screenshot

Comment 11

[Brian]

Attachment: msgFilterRules.dat for server in question

Comment 12

[:aceman]

I also set the offline options but the messages were only downloaded when I switched TB into offline mode (it then asked if I want to sync - and it downloaded bodies of all messages in the newsgroup). Still, the filter didn't apply. It did apply when using "Run filters on folder" from the menu, but is seems only when the filter is set on the newsgroup, not the server. I am not sure if it needed the bodies to be already downloaded. I am even convinced it copied messages that were not already downloaded, but that is not possible to do at the speed it was done. It may have cached them somewhere (as I tried the experiment several times). I need to investigate this more.

I am CCing more people, maybe they know how this is supposed/designed to work (what prerequisites it has).

Comment 13

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Removing myslef on all the bugs I'm cced on. Please NI me if you need something on MailNews Core bugs from me.

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(FYI move is no longer offered as an action)

This still fails, no matter where target folder is, imap and local. And filter log still empty. nothing in error console