811124 - [RFE] Allow filter to match on folder location

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Iain Hallam]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11

Steps to reproduce:

Mail on my server is sorted by several external programs such as sieve into an existing folder structure. At present I can only filter for these messages by recreating potentially dozens of rules from a wide array of sources in a local client, but that processing has already been done on another machine.



Expected results:

I should be able to define a filter that matches messages in a folder location within the account to take actions when mail arrives in certain boxes, so that my local machine can take advantage of the better processing available to arbitrary programs on the server.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

This is interesting. The question is if when receiving new messages filters are run on all folders or only on the Inbox. Probably on IMAP server they should on all folders.

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

There is an older bug requesting this as well that this should be duped to. My position for years has been that we should not proliferate search terms or filter actions in the core product, but rely on extensions for this. FiltaQuilla offers a search term based on folder name.

But I use that, and it does not work as well as I would like because filters are skipped for read messages. I fully agree that we need a better solution for sieve-managed servers.

Comment 3

[Iain Hallam]

(In reply to Kent James (:rkent) from comment #2)
> There is an older bug requesting this as well that this should be duped to.

Do you mean bug 293006 ?

Who would be able to reopen that bug?

Comment 4

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Iain Hallam from comment #3)
> (In reply to Kent James (:rkent) from comment #2)
> > There is an older bug requesting this as well that this should be duped to.
> 
> Do you mean https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293006 ?
> 
> Who would be able to reopen that bug?

Its reporter, or anyone with EDITBUGS permissions; see bug 293006 comment #2.

Comment 7

[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 8

[Axel Grude [:realRaven]]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #1)
> This is interesting. The question is if when receiving new messages filters
> are run on all folders or only on the Inbox. Probably on IMAP server they
> should on all folders.

I understand it that way: "Run automatically" should run on the filters that (non-inbox) folder whenever new mail is moved into it (manually or through other filters) - it should run on the newly moved emails only to avoid duplication and locks. 

It opens the other question "where" to list the folders. In filters list, logically the accounts drop-down should have all folders added that have specific filters, as we perceive the filters "per folder" (in the current implementation, Inboxes only). That might lead to the dropdown getting lengthy but wouldn't require new UI to be built.

Is the current filter execution engine asynchronous?

Comment 9

[Kent James (:rkent)]

"Is the current filter execution engine asynchronous?"

No. It should be, and there are many issues that are caused by this, but it is not.