Feature Request: Add filter to specific email account

[jeremymeyers]

I have a bunch of filters set up connected to individual email accounts rather than the "My Email" section of the filters list. It would be great for there to be a way to have new filters be associated with the accounts the email came from rather than as a global filter.

[RealRaven2000]

I have a bunch of filters set up connected to individual email accounts rather than the "My Email" section of the filters list.

What's a "my email" section? There is an entry for every server (mail account), my email is probably just what you named one of them?

It would be great for there to be a way to have new filters be associated with the accounts the email came from rather than as a global filter.

I don't know what you mean by "global filter" - when you create a filter using the assistant (by dropping mail to a folder) or via the right-click menu "quickFilters: create Filter from Message" - it indeed will find out the original inbox and save the filter to that account, There is no such thing as a "global" filter IIRC. Only Postbox has that concept, but internally it's just a synchronized copy of the same filter in various accounts.

[jeremymeyers]

What I mean is that quickfilters adds new ones here:

When I have my filters set up here:

[RealRaven2000]

Right on. So to explain - when you drag an email to a folder using the quickFilters assistant, quickFilters attempts to determine the original inbox folder, with various means. I can look this up and document in detail if you like. Does the account "My Email" have a different email address than the ones you want to use for filtering? And how do the emails get to that account in the first place?

There are 2 possibilities here:

• either the algorithm is buggy / needs improvements
• or something happens behind the scenes that I am currently not seeing (e.g. mail is moved from one account to the other by some process)

[jeremymeyers]

"My Email" isn't attached to any specific email address. As far as i can tell it is meant as a roll-up place to put filters that should apply to every account within the program. (i have 5 email addresses coming in to the program).

I can see how not knowing to which account an email was sent could make it a challenge to identify pre-existing filters.

My ideal use-case is:

1. Drag email from one account's inbox to one of my 'mailing list' subfolders (e.g. "music mailing lists")
2. QF analyzes and notes that there is already a filter set up where the action taken is to move emails that meet the criteris to the "music mailing lists" folder
3. QF offers to add its newly created criteria to the existing rule.

I guess this is kind of backing-out from the filters list rather than moving forward from the email info though.

Does that help?

[RealRaven2000]

"My Email" isn't attached to any specific email address. As far as i can tell it is meant as a roll-up place to put filters that should apply to every account within the program. (i have 5 email addresses coming in to the program).

that's a problem right there. I do not know how to create such a place. What's in the account settings? Sounds like something non-standard... If it's not an (old) mail account and not Local Folders then I really do not know what it is...

[jeremymeyers]

Ah ok. After doing some digging it appears "My Email" is a "special folder" account associated with the "Local Folders" capacity for POP3/IMAP mail. It is where TB puts outgoing mail when there are multiple accounts, and the global trash.

Sources:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Local_Folders
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297793

Looks like there are some associated bugs in Bugzilla

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615288
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1050463

This is, i guess, an unusual use case? If you'd like I can post on bugzilla in those threads, though it might get more traction if the owner of the plugin does so :)

[RealRaven2000]

Can you make a comment there an link it here, then I will chime in later on that thread. It's actually better if an end user who has the use case configured and can reproduce contributes because it's them who can test any potential fixes.

[RealRaven2000]

I am just revisiting "stale" issues at the moment as I am doing tidy up before the big debut of quickFilters on Thunderbird 78. Looking at all the very old (5 years and older) bugs on bugzilla it appears this "global filter" mechanism isn't really on the Tb core radar. I wonder if it would gain more traction if it could be brought up on the Addon developers mailing list:

https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/addons

We could mention that Postbox has a hack by having a "connected" filter that is basically a multiple copy of the same filter across all inboxes but they somehow manage to present it as "global" filter.

[jeremymeyers]

Sounds good and feel free to use my research/links in the prior comment.

[jeremymeyers]

Also left a followup comment on the bugzilla threads mentioned as there has been no movement in the 3 years.