Daniel wrote:
Are Filters supposed to be working in SM 2.49.5??
On several of my UseNet groups, I see posts offering "Solution Manuals"
so I have made Filters, with various combinations of capital 'S' and
'M', to 'Mark as Read' and 'Ignore Thread' across ALL of my UseNet
groups, but, still, I'm finding these Subjects appearing, not daily but
probably more than weekly.
Filters work fine. I'm currently running 2.53.2, and virtually all of
my filters (both mail and newsgroups) were created long before the
release of any 2.49 versions.
As a background, filters have two parts -- the section that identifies
specific messages, and the section that performs action(s) on identified
messages.
If you have filters that seem to be getting ignored, then chances are
likely that the logic is flawed, and not correctly identifying messages.
My experience is that it's easy to try to put too many logical
conditions into a single filter. A particular limitation is that there
isn't robust support for Boolean AND, OR and NOT conditions, especially
in combination. If you need complex conditions, it often takes a
combination of several filters running in sequence, rather than trying
to put all the conditions into a single filter.
A couple of suggestions:
1) Make sure you have logging enabled. That won't tell you when a filter
misses something that you want, but it will at least tell you when a
filter identifies a message. This is another reason to go with multiple
simple filters over a few larger, complex filters; if you have a filter
with a bunch of conditions in it, the log will show which filter was
tripped, but it won't tell you which condition caused the filter to trip.
2) If your existing filters aren't hitting anything, chances are pretty
good that your logic is too complex. Discard those filters, and start
over with new filters. As you build a new filters, keep them simple --
start with *one* condition. Only when you've confirmed that that is
working the way you want to, then you can either add conditions to that
filter (and make sure you're careful to distinguish between "Match All
of the following" (Boolean AND, where all conditions must be true), and
"Match any of the following" (Boolean OR, where one or more of the
conditions must be true). It's easy to get the wrong one, and when that
happens, the filter won't do what you want it to do.
If you haven't done so already, take a look at
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29 - this one does a
good job of walking you through building filters.
I will note that on this newsgroup, mozilla.support.seamonkey, I have 4
filters active. One looks for the "SupportTheFork" auto-notification
messages, and marks those as Read, where I don't see them, and "ignore
subthread" is chosen, where I also don't see any follow-up discussion.
Another filter has a bunch of commonly-used terms in subject lines used
by the Italian spammer, and is also set to ignore subthread. I don't
see any of the Italian spam. Another filter looks for my name as the
poster, and then tags the message, so that the display of that message
(and the thread) makes it easy to find messages I've posted, and threads
that I've participated in. I have a similar filter in place that tags
(with a different color) of topics I want to follow.
The bottom line is that filters do work, but they take some effort to
set up correctly, and it's essential to make sure that the logic portion
works. Keeping the logic simple will help a lot.
Smith
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