972344 - cannot create new mail filters

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Filters, defect)

Description

[Ray Arachelian]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131206145143

Steps to reproduce:

right click on incoming email address, select create filter from.  Form for filter creation comes up.  Fill in name and select subfolder to move email to.  Clicked Ok. List of filters come up, newly created filter does not show up in list.


Actual results:


Repeated process, it complained that "filter already exists" even though it did not.  Picked a new name, same behavior, new filter does not show up.


Expected results:

Filter should have been added to the top of the list, and should have been written to disk in the account's msgFilterRules.dat.  It did not contain the new filter.  Restarting thunderbird removes the "filter already exists" error, but new filter still does not get written to disk, shown in list of message filters.

I have something like 48-50 filters, is this a limit that could be raised/removed?

Comment 1

[:aceman]

(In reply to Ray Arachelian from comment #0)
> right click on incoming email address, select create filter from.  Form for
> filter creation comes up.  Fill in name and select subfolder to move email
> to.  Clicked Ok. List of filters come up, newly created filter does not show
> up in list.
I can't reproduce this problem. Filter appears and gets written to msgFilterRules.dat.

Do you happen to have filter filtering enabled? Anything written in the "search filters by name" field in the filter list dialog?

> Expected results:
> 
> Filter should have been added to the top of the list, and should have been
> written to disk in the account's msgFilterRules.dat.  It did not contain the
> new filter.  Restarting thunderbird removes the "filter already exists"
> error, but new filter still does not get written to disk, shown in list of
> message filters.
> 
> I have something like 48-50 filters, is this a limit that could be
> raised/removed?

No, there is not such limit. There is no practical limit on number of filters (there may be a limit of MAX_INT32 at 2^31 (~2 billion)) and we do tune filter editor performance on collections of 10000 test filters. So this should not be the cause of your problem.

Comment 2

[Ray Arachelian]

I don't have filter filtering enabled.  I even tried to edit the msgFilterRules.dat to add a new filter, and restarted thunderbird to no effect.  Is there a way to blow away the filter part of the profile and reload it somehow?

I've had the same profile for many years now, it's possible (likely even) that some cache file somewhere or sqlite db has crud or is corrupted.

Comment 3

[Ray Arachelian]

actually, just tried to manually add a filter to the msgFilterRules.dat directly and bounced thunderbird and it showed up in the list.  Trying the usual way through the GUI doesn't work, the new entry doesn't show in the list, it doesn't get written to the file either.  But if I use vi to add a filter, and restart, it shows up.  Weird.

I also shut it down and ran sqlite3 vacuum on all the .sqlite files, but that didn't affect anything.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

I don't think filters are cached anywhere else. I think the msgFilterRules.dat file is the authoritative source of filters and is read at TB startup.
Are you on TB24?

Comment 5

[:aceman]

Is this problem still happening?
Do you have the filter list window open before you try to create a new filter from message?

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ray be gone, apparently