With increasing numbers of suspicious attachments, where is the function to filter '.zip,' '.rar,' '.doc,' '.pdf,' etc. attachments?
I don't understand how hard it would be to have something read attachment file names, and filter those with '.zip,' '.rar,' '.doc,' '.pdf,' 'Invoice,' 'George Smith,' or whatever I type in to be filtered. Thunderbird most certainly prints to screen those extensions and file names when I look at any individual e-mail, and it lists them, right there, under "attachments."
Where do I learn to write something like this for an add-on or whatever...
If attachment and if filename = ".zip" or ".rar" or ".doc" or "custname", then move to foldername
and what problems (besides learning programming language) will I face?
I get "hasn't been done," "no one interested in writing it," all manner of generic "too difficult" or "not in the aegis of my purview." Ok, where do I get started (total noob with only advanced Basic language programming experience), since no one else seems willing to handle it?
Alle svar (2)
It depends on what you mean by 'filter'. If you mean select, then the built-in Quick Filter will find all messages with attachments. What I suspect you mean is something more like remove? If so, it might be do-able, but is probably not straightforward. The challenge you face is that, as far as I understand it, attachments are not sent as attachments when an email is transmitted. Instead, the content of an attachment is incorporated into the body of the message, so that the whole thing is transmitted as one: I guess this is to minimise the risk of attachments becoming 'lost'. An email client like Thunderbird has to parse the body of the message, identify the 'attachment' embedded in it, and then extract that and re-create it as a separate file. Your strategy, therefore, would be to set up a series of filters in Thunderbird, each of which would search for a telltale phrase that identifies a particular kind of attachment, and would then do whatever you want to the message. That approach is suggested here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=114201 (third post) As an example, I've just looked at the source code of an email I received, which has a '.docx' document attached. The message body contains, just before the embedded document, the identifying phrase 'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word': presumably that is one of the clues that tells Thunderbird what kind of attachment it is. So if you inspect the source code of messages with attachments, you may be able to work out what key phrases to look for, and thus to create filters to treat those messages in a particular way. But it will be a lot of work!
It's possible to search for messages with a particular attachment type if you install this add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/
but then you would have to manually move them to another folder. If you just want to display messages with a particular attachment name or type, this add-on may be useful:
As for automatic filters, it's possible to detach or save attachments, and then move messages, according to various criteria with FiltaQuilla.