Introduction to Thunderbird Part 7: Message FiltersSaturday September 13th, 2003Morten W. Petersen writes: "Kay Frode has created another article introducing new users to Thunderbird, which explains how to create and use message filters. It follows the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth articles, which received great reviews and lots of helpful feedback up on our website. Any comments? Thanks." Message filters is one of the things where outlook still is better IMHO. The wizard style filter tool can actually be a time saver. I also like the context menu option to generate a filter rule. The thunderbird UI is adequate but not more than that. I miss integration with the addressbook for instance. Maybe some shortcuts for some often used types of filters would also be a good idea (e.g. move messages from X to folder Y). It seems odd to put so much effort into documenting a 0.2 release interface. I think the interface is good enough as it is, and think it would be a better idea to focus on areas that help the user, like for example wizards for message filters. It will confuse users when the main interface keeps changing. However, if they choose to change it, we'll be updating the tutorial to reflect the new interface. it was based of of the main mozilla mail client, so its not like it a brand new featureless program thats going to utterly change its UI on the way to 1.0. i can see too much wrong with the UI now, so documenting it is a great idea, IMHO. There is one critical missing feature in message filters - working with "Received" headers. Most of the time, a message has multiple of these headers. However, it only filters on the **first** received header found, instead of filtering on all of them. This makes it very difficult to sort messages based on which server/e-mail address it was sent to. (the To: field is a lot of the time incorrect, especially for spam) This is a deal breaker for me to start using Thunderbird :-( Has anyone got any suggestions on how to workaround, maybe script? It is misleading, and thus hard to provide support for. Recent support call (Me): "You know you can setup two accounts in Outlook, and filter incoming mail from one into a seperate folder so you can easily send them a change of address.." Him: Really? Him: How? We play with the wizard and he says.. "Oh cool, so now I just check the box that says "of a particular account".. select move to folder, select the account and the folder by clicking on the hyperlink. e-mail later: something weird is happening. When I send a message, I get my own response in the folder I created. They're getting the messages. What gives? /me realizes that Outlook (unlike any other mail client in the world) doesn't ask you whether to apply a rule to incoming or outgoing mail--it does both. Would the instruction: "tell it to scan the To: line for your old address and put such messages in a seperate folder?" be simpler. Yes, I think it would. The thunderbird interface is almost identical to The Bat! except better, and reminds me of pmail's beautiful filtering system. (I currently use The Bat! because it is less RAM hungry--and will probably always be. However, Thunderbird may prove to be more stable in its final release.. oh the irony.) |