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After consolidating accounts in Local Inbox, message filters won't run automatically and have to be run manually on the folder.

  • 3 cavab
  • 1 has this problem
  • 21 views
  • Last reply by Matt

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My oldest personal email service provider decided at the first of this year to discontinue my email domain. They gave me until March 1, 2016 to migrate all my email to a new email account, which I have now set up over a month ago. I also have managed to get my Thunderbird email client to include both the forwarded old account messages and my new email account messages in one Global Inbox, along with one other email account. However, getting my old email account message filters, which used to work on my old email account well, moved over to my new email account has been problematic. Now, although the will properly move my email messages from the Global Inbox, I must now "Run filters on folder" manually to get Thunderbird to move the messages out of the Global Inbox into the assigned Folders and Subfolders that I have set up. When email messages first begin to download, I get an error message regarding the Message Filtering process, and the message then appears in the Global Inbox, instead of the assigned Folder/Subfolder that it used to be automatically routed to before.

Previously, message filtering was automatic, as every filter rule was to be executed when "Getting New Mail: Filter Before Junk Classification". This seems to result in the aforementioned error dialog boxes, specifying the assigned Folder/Subfolder that the message should have automatically been moved to. I then have to clear the dialog box by clicking "OK" and then after all incoming messages are downloaded into the Global Inbox, I have to manually "Run filters on folder".

My oldest personal email service provider decided at the first of this year to discontinue my email domain. They gave me until March 1, 2016 to migrate all my email to a new email account, which I have now set up over a month ago. I also have managed to get my Thunderbird email client to include both the forwarded old account messages and my new email account messages in one Global Inbox, along with one other email account. However, getting my old email account message filters, which used to work on my old email account well, moved over to my new email account has been problematic. Now, although the will properly move my email messages from the Global Inbox, I must now "Run filters on folder" manually to get Thunderbird to move the messages out of the Global Inbox into the assigned Folders and Subfolders that I have set up. When email messages first begin to download, I get an error message regarding the Message Filtering process, and the message then appears in the Global Inbox, instead of the assigned Folder/Subfolder that it used to be automatically routed to before. Previously, message filtering was automatic, as every filter rule was to be executed when "Getting New Mail: Filter Before Junk Classification". This seems to result in the aforementioned error dialog boxes, specifying the assigned Folder/Subfolder that the message should have automatically been moved to. I then have to clear the dialog box by clicking "OK" and then after all incoming messages are downloaded into the Global Inbox, I have to manually "Run filters on folder".

All Replies (3)

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Were your filters previously implemented in the actual Inbox of the account?

Typically, Thunderbird's filters operate only in the Inbox of an account and are triggered by the arrival (or fetching) of new messages. I'm not sure if messages being redirected to a Global Inbox trigger the filtering action. I've become used to filters moving messages to Local Folders and then having to run the filter manually. There are several addons that offer a toolbar button to run filters, so clearly others have encountered this same issue and have created these buttons as a work around.

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I previously had the filters set up for my old email account. I thought I could avoid having to recreate each filter, as I have literally hundreds of filters to direct specific messages from a business, organization, or personal email to the correct folder that I have created for that business, organization, or person. Some businesses may have subfolders for alerts, promo messages, newsletters, order-shipment information, etc. Setting all the filters up again for the new email account would be a formidable undertaking.

Can one not apply filters to all mail in the Inbox of a Local Folders account that captures email from all my three different accounts I have set up in Thunderbird?

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you can do it, you just need to copy the file msgfilterrules.dat

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1008363