If new message filter enabled, Thunderbird starts downloading all messages aggressively regardless of Synchronization & Storage setting.
I have synched only the most recent 30 days messages under Synchronization & Storage. If I create any new message filter (particularly matching rule containing a word of the message body), TBird starts downloading messages aggressively regardless of its age. There have only been 500 messages in the past 30days. But it is downloading more than 30000 messages. Initially the profile folder was only 250MB, After enabling the filter it is gradually increasing. Now it is 2.5 GB.
In fact there is no any messages that match the filter rule. I created that filter for the messages to be received in the future. (For automatic tagging purpose).
How can I apply a filter only for the latest messages to be received but not on the older than the N days specified under Synchronization & Storage?
All Replies (2)
Synchronising the most recent 30 days does not mean you will only see the last 30 days or that only recent 30 days is the only emails you can access. It means all others will be downloaded as headers only. If you access older emails either via a search or force a rule to act on the folder then those emails will be downloaded but they are marked "pending removal". When you access (read) an email older than X days it gets stored in the mbox file but is marked "pending removal" and it will only be removed when the folder is compacted. So the mbox can still get bigger than it would be with just 30 days of email. This can be managed so you get an auto-compact prompt by setting the advanced parameter Compact all folder when it will save over Y MB in total. Or you can also manually select the large folder and compact it. This won't delete any messages that were not already "IMAP marked for deletion" from the server.
So, Right click on folder and select 'compact' to remove full copies of those that are older than 30 days.
I had a lengthy discussion in trying to understand the full and complete working of how this '30 days of synchronised' emails actually worked. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564421
re :How can I apply a filter only for the latest messages to be received
When you create the filter make sure 'Apply filter when:' select checkbox :'Getting new Mail'.
Do not select 'Manually 'Run' or any other.
Then it only acts on new mail and never on anything else.
If you want it to perform a filter manually on the last 30 days, you would also set a condition 'age in days' 'is less than' 31. As this would obviously not be working on only new mail, you would have a separate filter set only for 'Manually Run'. But if same filter created for 'Getting new mail' it is already doing it to new mail, age in days condition is irrelevant and not required.
Thank you for your reply.
I have already created this filter by only selecting "Getting new Mail" and deselecting "Manually Run". Still It downloads all the messages. It happens only when I set a condition "Body" "Contains" <word>. I could not create a filter which is to be applied automatically only on new messages. Any Idea?
(For 30 days older messages, I tried a separate filter set only for "Manually Run", with the condition 'age in days' 'is less than' 31, It works perfectly.)
I understand the concept of marking "Pending removal" in Mbox format. But what about if it is a IMAP account in Maildir format?
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