IMAP filters
01.08.10 - 02:44pm
Due to some mayhem at my email host, I’d been trying gmail anew for a few days. I’ve had an active account there for a very long time, but this was the first time I’d really used gmail in anger (as my bugzilla account).
It turns out gmail and extended headers, such as those bugzilla delivers, don’t quite work together well, and the massive flood of emails I get from bugzilla is too firehose-like to be managed without those headers, so I quickly retreated to the safer ground of a Thunderbird nightly.
BUT, I have also become addicted to being able to use Google Sync (ala ActiveSync) with my phone for contacts, email, and calendar (no tasks! *pout*). So I need to be able to check bugmail from my phone, but having extensive filtering there isn’t really necessary. Having it at my desktop is critical. But I still don’t want my phone to think I’ve got email every time bugzilla spams me. So I set up a gmail filter to kick bugzilla mail off to my bugzilla folder.
Thunderbird, though, in its default configuration, does not perform additional filtering on any folder other than “Inbox”. I wanted priority highlighting to work in Thunderbird without having to “Run Filters on Folder” every time I switched. Here’s the trick:
In about:config for Tbird (Tools -> Options -> General -> Config Editor), add the following key:
mail.server.default.applyIncomingFilters = “true”
(It’s important that the key be a string), and you’ll get filtration in all of your IMAP folders.
Just in case anyone asks, this is a new feature in TB 3.0 that does not work in TB 2.0. Also, you can get a finer control of this on a per-folder or per-account basis with the FiltaQuilla extension.
Perhaps you will try to set the filters using the webinterface of gmail , then when a email arrive to you account is instant without delay.