Trouble with message filters
I seem to have a lot of trouble with message filters. Here's today's issue.
I have filters for a bunch of mailing lists. Recognize an incoming message and move it to a folder. These work more or less as expected.
However, I also want to mark some of them as read, basically, the automated ones. So I have another filter for "find any of a bunch of telltale markers and mark it read". This also works... when run alone manually.
But when I put them both in together, live, my messages get moved, but not all of them get marked as read.
I've been through the log but I can't seem to catch any particular instances of messages that are being moved but not marked as read. However, I have them in my mail folders.
Filter order doesn't seem to be the issue. I mean, if I move them before marking, then there's nothing left in the inbox to be found to mark. So I mark them first, then move, but only some of them get marked.
I'm confused. Any guesses what's going on here? Or suggestions on how I might go about chasing this down?
All Replies (5)
message filers only run on inbox messages, so if you have a filter moving them out of the inbox, you need to get any other filter you wish to act on that message to execute before the move occurs. Use the sort option in the filter list to get them in the order you need.
Yeah, I'm doing that. Marking is first. Moving is later.
I've tracked down instances where the log claims the message was marked read before it was moved, but in the destination mailbox, it's still marked unread.
I'm beginning to wonder whether filters are actually, strictly sequenced. I suspect they are not. I'll have to rework all of my filters if that's the case.
I have found on IMAP accounts in particular that making filters run after classification helps with random failures. Especially with IMAP filtering can occur before the entire message is downloaded so items in message body may not work as expected. For POP accounts, sometime there are minor delays while the anti virus does it's thing that can cause the message to not filter correctly. After classification delays filtering a little but increases te risk of filtered messages being classified as spam.
Well... *cough*. After switching things around to before & after junk classification... at least I have different errors now.
With "mark read" "before" classification and all of my "move" things after, I now see both items in the folders that should have been marked read but weren't, and also items marked as read in my Inbox that should have been moved and weren't.
I'll screw with it for a while but this isn't very encouraging.
If you have anti virus. Ensure it is not scanning incoming mail and that it is not actively scanning in the Thunderbird profile folder while updates occur.
Thunderbird stores mail in large files. These day often over a gigabyte in size. these take around 10 minutes to scan with an anti virus so scanning can have huge impacts on the reliability of things like filters as the files involved periodically are just not available.
I strongly suggest you compact folders regularly (file > compact) with filters moving mail the amount of allocated but technically unused space in your inbox in particular will be grown quickly (space allocated for moved email is not freed until a compact occurs so the inbox just grows with each new mail.)
Because of a tendency of folks to try and keep everything these days, many feel incorrectly that compacting will delete their mail. It is just a housekeeping process that is needed to consolidate the information stored in the file to be the same as what is displayed. Failure to do it just increases the time files are unavailable due to scanning and other processes like backups and synchronization.