Message Filters NOT user friendly
The only tool for debugging message filters seems to be the filter log. Reading my message log, I found that each of several hundred messages were date-stamped identically - as: at 12/31/1969 7:00:00 PM moved message ... The message itself is not identified other than by the time stamp - which of course is completely useless for this or any other purpose. Fortunately I looked at the log immediately after the message came in or I would not have been able to identify the filter - as it is I am not entirely sure I identified the right one.
The name of the filter that triggered each action was named. Sadly, those filters are not listed in alphabetic order and there is no way to re-order them. Probably they are listed in the order they were created. This makes it difficult to find any specific filter (I have more than 2200 filters defined). When I did finally find the appropriate filter, I had to wonder whether there was more than one filter by that name since I could see no reason for it to trigger the action that was apparently taken.
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2200 filters? Good lord I don't think I have received mail from that many people in the past 20 years combined. What do you do with such an extraordinary number of filters? Please do not say manage SPAM.
What version of Thunderbird are you using? Filter search appears to have been in the product for a couple of years now. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450302
I'm using Thunderbird 31.0 which I think is the most current version and yes, I am using it to remove spam. When I get some spam I create a new filter - I started this approach within the last year and it is helping cut down on the flow.
I still have all the problems I mentioned before. The log file is not of much use since it only identifies messages by the time stamp and all messages have the same time stamp according to the log file entries.
Perhaps there are ways to solve this problem but I don't know what they might be. Can I search for a filter by its name or by its content? If so I don't know how to do it.
I use the search field. The one that was implemented in Version 17 per the bug I referenced earlier.
Perhaps there are ways to solve this problem but I don't know what they might be.
There is a junk mail button. It is a learning filter that learns from your actions. Using filters is about the most time consuming non productive method of approaching SPAM that a person can take short of replying to each message. And the junk filter just does not get anything out of it so your involvement does not decrease over time.
2200 filters means that each mail upon receive has to be compared to 2200 rules you have instituted before there is any change of the mail being displayed. (probably 2150 of them relate to spam that stopped coming twelve months ago and that is gong to grow to perhaps 5000 filters in the next 12 months) That is a hugely expensive process in terms to CPU usage. Anytime now you will probably see time out errors as the filter process is simply taking to long. I have all my mail managed by about a dozen filters and I can assure you thousands of filters is not a long term solution to anything.
Real SPAM solutions are; MozillaZine Discussion http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls Mail Washer http://www.mailwasher.net/ A collection of SPAM filtering software here http://www.spychecker.com/software/freeware_spam.html
Free mail services like Gmail and Outlook.com also do a great job filtering spam and can be used to collect mail from other existing mail accounts (Like Comcast Verizon etc) I have seen about 5 spam messages in my gmail account ( with is linked to all over the web) in the past year. But there are always a few in the SPAM folder.
