Filter works only when trigger manually
I have a hotmail/outlook account configured as IMAP. Some mail is directly retrieved in the junk folder. Since some legit emails go to the junk folder I always have to browse the folder in order not to miss important mails. Luckily, 90% of my junk mail has always the same reply-to field, so there is a very simple pattern to implement in the filters which would let me get rid of the real 90% of the spam. But then the surprise... the filter I defined, only works when manually run on the junk folder explicitly. This is useless, of course. I feel stupid but I cannot get it to work. So I am asking here how can I accomplish this very basic task. I believe I am missing something...
All Replies (12)
That is by design. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1214694
You could try setting up server-side rules instead, and have them run before spam filtering.
First of all, thank you very much for your kind answer.
My mail service (hotmail/outlook) does not let me create server-side rules. But this is not surprising: I am using a desktop email client just to have more freedom to do this kind of things... Since this is "by design" and since my target is quite simple and extremely common, then there must be some other way to accomplish this task, can you help me? Actually, during a quick google search, I just found many people facing the same trouble as me...
I am puzzled...
As a last resort, are there add-ons to do what I need?
THis is set in the bottom of the filter setup pane. Click Tools>Message Filters and look at the bottom line.
david, what do you mean? In the bottom line of the filter pane I only see a dropdown menu where I can choose the folder on which the filter is manually run. (Image attached)
Your initial concern was that the filter was running on the Junk folder and you implied you wanted to control on which folder it ran on.
No, that was not my concern. Sorry if I didn't explain it well. I guess Stans got it.
Unfortunately the rules I can define there are basic and cannot involve the Reply-To field.
You can, using the "header contains" condition since Reply-To is a header.
You're right! Sorry I didn't saw it at first sight. Thank you Stans. I hope it works... we will see... (even in outlook.com I am not sure whether the rule will run at the right time).
Nevertheless I was hoping Thunderbird had this basic functionality. Having part of the rules on the server and part on the client is not ideal (just think if I had to apply some rules to different accounts from different providers).
Anyway, thanks.
You could send a test message to that account with the matching reply-to address and see how Outlook.com handles it.
No, nothing to do. Even outlook.com does not let run rules on messages already identified as junk. I find this crazy. In this moment I have my junk folder with 29 messages coming from the same sender which are real spam and one legit email. If I had a filter, all the 29 would have been deleted.