[imp] Filter Suggestions

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Darragh Bailey <felix at compsoc.nuigalway.ie>:

> 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.

As Jan said, you should take a look at ingo since many of the things you have
requested have already been implemented there (http://www.horde.org/ingo/)

> 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.

This is somewhat difficult to implement, especially since most filtering
solutions at the present time don't allow this (sieve, procmail, other server
based solutions).  This is possible using IMAP commands (the imap driver in
ingo for example), but the UI would have to be vastly improved because this no
longer is true filtering - this is more like 'sorting' messages.  Ingo deals
with filters - there would have to be a whole different UI for this 'sorting'
mechanism that made clear that it had nothing to do with filtering at all.

Ingo does have support for 'filter on demand' for those backends that support it
(namely, the imap backend).  This kind of does what you are looking for, but it
is not perfect (namely because it won't allow you to do filtering when the
messages enter your mailbox).

> 2) Filter fields are restrictive.
> Currently imp only provides the ability to filter based on five 
> fields To, Cc, From, Subject & Body.

This is a limitation of the IMAP c-client extension to PHP (it is limited to
IMAP v2 search rules) that has been worked around in ingo/IMP HEAD.  You can
sort by any header field in the new versions of these applications.


> 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.

Already done.

> 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?

If someone would come up with a patch that performed this while keeping the UI
clean (I can't think of a way to do this without making the filter page look
ugly) I would gladly commit it.

michael

______________________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at bigworm.colorado.edu]
The University of Colorado at Boulder