[imp] Filter Suggestions

[Darragh Bailey]

Hi,


Looking at the filters and used them for a good while now and I've notice the 
following things that would be useful to me and perhaps to others. 

1) All filters must be applied at the same time
Currently your limited to applying all the filters at the same time, there is 
no ability for certain filters to be applied at login/refresh time while others 
can be applied manually later. 

Why do I think that it would be a good idea to be able to apply filters at 
different times is that with blacklists and filters set up to remove spam, its 
useful to be able to apply these whenever the mail folder is 
opened/accessed/refreshed/on login/etc whereas I think most people (well 
definitely myself and a number of my friends) prefer to read their valid mail 
from the inbox and filter it out into the various mailboxes after being read. 
At the moment in order to have any spam/blacklists filter off into a Trash/spam 
folder I'm having to use receipe's in procmail because imp doesn't provide the 
functionality to perform this without filtering off all my other mail 
simultaneously into their assigned folders. Currently have 49 filters in place 
in imp :)


2) Filter fields are restrictive.
Currently imp only provides the ability to filter based on five fields To, Cc, 
From, Subject & Body. To me this doesn't allow sufficient scope. I personnally 
use for my spam filter "X-Spam-Status: Yes" and various blackmail lists "Return-
path: some_blacklisted_return_path" in procmail. Also various mailing lists 
have identifiers such as "List-Id: mailing_list_name", imps tag is "List-Id: 
IMP mailing list <imp.lists.horde.org>". I know that you can use some of the 
current tags to pick up this mailing list, but with others where the list is 
Bcc'ed or the mailing list is actually signed up to another mailing list. I.e 
by sending to one mailing list it actually sents it to a number of other 
mailing lists without them necessarily showing up in the general fields used by 
imp.

What I was thinking of would it be useful to allow for a series of advanced 
fields to be used as well. instead of just having To:, From:, etc checkboxes, 
include a "Custom Field" checkbox which when ticked enables a user to enter a 
mail header or series of mail headers to check for into a text box and these 
can be used with the text that the rule is to use to filter. This would mean 
that experienced users have have the ability to define rules based on 
additional header fields without the necessity of having to create different 
options. Naturally I've yet to example the object code in detail that handles 
this to see just how complex implementing this is.


3) Sorting Rules
Rule order is important, however when you have a significant number of rules it 
can become very cumbersome to change the order about when you create a new rule.

Would it be useful that when you go to move a rule up/down that there is an 
additional box that would allow you to control how many you could move up/down 
by instead of being limited to 1 step in either direction?




These are just some thoughts of mine on what I personally would find useful 
when dealing with the filters through imp. I haven't examined the code all that 
much to see how visible these suggestions would be.

-- 
Darragh

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"