re :I try to organize my filters by name so sometimes there are so many filters it takes forever to get it in the right order.

Please note that Message Filters will run in the order listed either before or after the Junk Classification filter. So listing by name order may not always be suitable.

re : is there was a way to tell which filters are getting hit and how often they are getting hit You can tell what filters have been enacted and what they moved if you have the Filter Logging enabled.

• Open 'Message Filters'
• Click on 'Filter Log' button to see list.
• If nothing is listed, select the checkbox 'Enable the Filter Log'.
• click on 'Close'.

However, this does not include a count.

In the specific accounts subfolder in the profile, you will find 'msgFilterRules.dat' file that contains the Filters and a 'filterlog.htm' file that contains all the log info for that account.

Both of the above can be opened using a text editor program eg: Wordpad, Notepad etc.

However as an idea you can try..... If you saved a copy of 'filterlog.htm' to desktop, so using this to work on instead of the 'live' copy in Thunderbird. Then open filterlog.htm using OpenOffice Writer. Use the 'Find & Replace' option. Let's say you had a filter called 'TB Forum'. Each occurance of a filter would start with something like this: Date and Time followed by Applied filter "TB Forum" to message... So in the 'Find & Replace' type TB Forum in the 'Find' and also in the 'Replace' then click on 'Replace All' button. So in effect nothing changes, but............. It will return something like this: 'Search key replaced xxxx times'

Thus telling you how many times that 'TB Forum' named Filter move an email. So allowing you to discover whether that filter really is being used a lot or not. As there is a date at the start of each filter, you can easily work out how many times a specific filter performed a task between the first date at top filter and last date of last filter.

I know it is not a simple click fix, but it should get you the info you may be looking for.

That's not a bad idea, I'm going to play around with that and see if I can just re-import the filter log files and run queries against it to get the hit count.

Might not be a bad idea for a feature later on or a plug-in. For example, putting another column next to 'Enabled' in the Message Filters dialogue box that shows the hit counts. I just checked and I have about 188 items in there so anything that can make it easier to manage would be great.

My problem is that some of these mailing lists I'm on intentionally change the from or subject field every so often. So I just create another rule to organize them and put them back into the right folder which builds up over time because I never go back to delete the old filter which I'm not sure is still being used unless I do something like you recommended above.

I would suggest that almost everyone I have seen that has lots of filter created using the menu item you mention are undertaking a completely fallacious attempt to manage spam with filters. Simply put. Live is to short to waste on doing that.