[sylpheed:36513] Re: Mail filters don't work reliably

[Rich Coe]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2017 22:37:25 +0100
Antonio Ospite <ao2 at ao2.it> wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:43:50 +0100
> Merlin Büge <merlinbuege at web.de> wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I have several mail filters set up in Sylpheed, primarily to move mails
> > from various mailing lists into their corresponding folder.
> > 
> > Sometimes however, some mails slip the filter and end up in the default
> > INBOX.
> > 
> > For example, this mail
> > https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/02/msg00922.html
> > bypassed a filter
> >   {To} {contains} "debian-user"
> > and this mail
> > https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2017-February/083382.html
> > bypassed a filter
> >   {Subject} {contains} "[coreboot]"
> >
> 
> When you launch sylpheed with the "--debug" argument look for lines
> starting with "filter-log:".

I agree that the easiest way to diagnose the issues is to look at the 
debug messages when it happens.

I looked at my rules because I hadn't experienced the issue. 

I have some early created rules that matched only {From}/{To}/{CC} based on 
username like your debian-user.  All my later rules, which I may have created 
with the 'create filter rule Automattically' feature, and then edited, include
the full email address: {From} {contains}  someuser at some.host.com
This also prevents filtering out false postives if some one has 'debian-user'
as some other part of the {From} or {To} field.

Another nice thing about the 'create Automattically' feature is when you pick
a different field than the one the tool picked, it auto-fills the value in.  A number of
lists use the {List-Id} attribute, which makes it nicer to match from the mail
list than listing multiple entries for {To}, {CC}, {From}, etc.

Another thing to try is to look at the failing message with the 
View>Message Source option, and also pull up the filter rules from
{sylpheed-home}/filter.xml and see if any of the rules from the top down
match something before your 'debian-user' or some other rule.

Rich
-- 
Rich Coe     rcoe at wi.rr.com