How can I set up message filters to match exact words rather than finding strings that are part of other words?
I want to create a message filter whereby if any of a list of words appears in the subject or body of the email, the message gets moved to a folder. Is there a way to ensure that the word is a discrete word and not party of another word? For example, if the word is 'cat' I want to match ONLY 'cat' and not 'scatter', for example. Is there a way to do this with string delimiters or wild cards in Thunderbird?
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Probably not. An add-on that introduced "regular expressions" to the filtering would allow you to set up such a specific search. But unfortunately neither of the two add-ons I know about can search reliably on message body text.
Both FiltaQuilla and Expression Search/Gmail UI offer some regular expression capability.
Well is there a way to include AND and OR filters together, or run a filter on messages once they are moved to a certain subfolder (or always on the subfolder)? That would narrow it down quite a bit. E.g., could I allow another filter to run that would move some messages to a subfolder, and then have my new filter run on that subfolder?
FiltaQuilla's regular expressions provide a means to apply an OR function.
The syntax would be of the form of /\w(cat)|(dog)|(horse)\w/i where the \w marks a word boundary and the /.../i notation means to ignore case.
FiltaQuilla also provides an action to only run on a specified folder. But if you filter to a subfolder you'll need to run subsequent filters manually since Thunderbird only runs filters automatically on the Inbox.
If you know how to code javascript then an alternative approach would be to use another FiltaQuilla action to run your script where you could, I presume, write arbitrarily complex filter rules.