Apply a duplicate search as one of the message filtering rules

[dec3169]

I don't even know if this is possible or not but I thought it would be useful enough that I would ask.

I have multiple IMAP servers and a ton of filters. The multiple servers are so I have backups that don't depend on providers and their sometimes bad practices (I lost over 100k emails a few years back due to back backups). I have filters based on how many days old an email is, and they will copy the messages to one server and then move it to another so I have 2 backups.

I wanted to know if there is some way to run this extension in my filters - so after copying a bunch of messages I would like a filter action to run this extension. I don't see any options for this currently, but there is a filter option to run an actual program. This is probably more of an issue to request through Mozilla, but I thought I'd ask if you knew of anything first.

Thanks

[eyalroz]

Hello @dec3169 ,

I'm very sorry for the long delay in replying. There's a war in Palestine/Israel for the past year, and a genocide in Gaza specifically, and I'm trying to be active in opposing it.

Anyway, regarding your situation: While it is possible, in principle, to do what you ask - the code for this will be quite different from my extensions. You see, this would require maintaining, indefinitely, an efficient search structure, covering all existing messages, with all possible/relevant comparison criteria - and whenever a message is received, searching that structure for the single message. This is different than what I do now, which is an ad-hoc pass, once, on all messages. So, it would require as much code as the extension has now and possibly more.

That is not a reason to reject this request. However, I would recommend not automatically removing duplicates on reception, as there is always the chance that the messages aren't really duplicates, and only have similar meta-data - in which case the auto-removal may well result in data loss.

On the other hand, the action could be marking the message as a dupe (e.g. with a different color, or moving it to a different folder), which isn't that bad. And still, no review dialog... it's possible, but I'm not sure I should encourage this. Hmm.

Let's put it this way: If I had a lot of time; and if the Thunderbird project were not busy trying to suppress and kill extensions; I would consider working on this. For now, I would review a pull-request, but I don't see myself implementing this in the near future.