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filter (?) on number of recipients?

  • 7 replies
  • 3 have this problem
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  • Last reply by JeanneR

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This is prompted by my being part of a group that generating too much e-mail and, especially, mis-using REPLY ALL.

So I'd like to be able to filter on the number of recipients (either TO or CC). I'd like to give priority to e-mail that is addressed only to me and possibly one or two others. But these are not specific people. I want to give priority to e-mail from anybody if it is addressed only to me. And I want to ignore mail that has too many recipients even if one or two of them are very important people.

Even if I filter on members names, it still doesn't give me a count (I think). Is there a way to do this? Or is there some clever trick outside the filtering function that I'm not thinking of?

Desperate! Thanks for any ideas.

This is prompted by my being part of a group that generating too much e-mail and, especially, mis-using REPLY ALL. So I'd like to be able to filter on the number of recipients (either TO or CC). I'd like to give priority to e-mail that is addressed only to me and possibly one or two others. But these are not specific people. I want to give priority to e-mail from anybody if it is addressed only to me. And I want to ignore mail that has too many recipients even if one or two of them are very important people. Even if I filter on members names, it still doesn't give me a count (I think). Is there a way to do this? Or is there some clever trick outside the filtering function that I'm not thinking of? Desperate! Thanks for any ideas.

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Well, maybe not ignore. Maybe mark low priority. I don't want to be mean. ;-)

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The only way I can think of is creating a filter on the To: or Cc: header and specifying a pattern with a number of commas, like *,*,*. Then you can change the priority with the filter action or move the message to a specific folder.

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That is fascinating. Have you made this work? I never saw the use of wildcards in filters, but I'm game. I set up a filter for TO or CC -- *,*,*,* to move to another folder. I couldn't get it to run manually. But I actually control enough e-mail addresses that I could test it running auto. It did not. Thunderbird skipped over those messages and moved them elsewhere depending on filters lower on the list. I tried adding quotation marks and re-ran on the same messages, but some just moved according to filters even lower on the list.

This will be so great if I can make it work. You've got me so excited. Pleeeeeze... can you think of anything else I need to do?

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Looks like out of the box you cannot filter on expressions, so you are stuck at filtering on To (or CC) contains a comma, but that probably selects too many messages.

Try the FiltaQuilla add-on, then you can do a regexp match on any header line…

Modified by Onno Ekker

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Your link took me to a domain registrar (I think). I'm extremely interested in the add-on. Can you supply a link?

Thanks.

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Chosen Solution

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I'm back to thank you. The documentation for FiltaQuilla is so abysmal that I needed to find some time to figure it out. Trying to cope with it for several nights running when I needed sleep just led nowhere.

But I finally did get a little time to focus on it in the daytime and I got it working. Very useful.

So many many thanks, Jeanne