Version: 1.5 (using KDE 3.1.0) Installed from: SuSE Compiler: gcc version 3.2 OS: Linux (i686) release 2.4.19-4GB In my opinion the filter system of KMail is very useful, but it's too difficult to add a filter for people that don't know how eMails work... KMail should learn a filter-rule when a user moves a Mail from one to another directory and then ask if a filter-rule should be created and how the rule should work (e.g. subject or sender, or domain etc.) The interface should be very easy and advise the user a fitting rule.
Agreed, when a X-mailing list is present or other tag specific from mailing programs, a small popup should ask "this email is send to a mailing list, do you want to filter these email and to sort them in a specific folder?" asking yes should create autolatically the filter, and the folder. Of course this should be enabled by default, and be disabled for advanced users :) Emmanuel
Another useful variation on this idea would be to associate filters with address book entries - Allowing a filter to apply to any of a person's email addresses - With the ability to define default filter settings for new address book entries
or - filter on the place in the adressbook the contact is (like in "friends", "Work") and put them in the right folder... if all mails from an adress in the map "friends" in the adressbook is put in the map "friends" in Kmail, that whould be damn easy!
...and any of the points from comments #2 or #3 might be tied into the "Categories" settings as well.
The functionality from POPFile could be integerated into KMail to achieve this (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/).
How about doing it this way: 1) Allow assigning a KAdressbook contact or a category to a KMail folder 2) Function (RMB menu?) to add a filter rule based on the known Mail adresses of that contact (or all contacts in a category) It should not be a static rule which is created once and has to be maintained by the user but rather one which automatically changes if the KAdressbook data is changing. Think of a person changing its e-Mail address. That data should be entered once by the user (in KAdressbook) and KMail should modify the filter rule. Perhaps this would be easiest to store if KAdressbook had an entry for contacts or categories which holds the appropriate KMail folder? I'd expect holding things in sync to be the challenging part :)
> Think of a person changing its e-Mail address. How could KMail know that the address should be changed? If someone posts from two addressees, the filter will ping-pong between them. That is almost certainly wrong - if it is from someone posting from a particular address (say a work address), I may want it put in one directory, and from another address (say a KDE or a uni address), it should go into another. This doesn't seem worth it to me.
> How could KMail know that the address should be changed? If someone > posts from two addressees, the filter will ping-pong between them. That is >almost certainly wrong - if it is from someone posting from a particular >address (say a work address), I may want it put in one directory, and from >another address (say a KDE or a uni address), it should go into another. > This doesn't seem worth it to me. Kmail shouldn't filter on the address, but it should check if the sender is in the address book, if so, in what categories, and then choose in what folder the mail belongs. so if the email address changes, it doesn't matter - as long as the new address belongs to the same person, it will end up in the same map. This is already possible: you can filter on categorie. but I think this bugreport wants kmail to ask if you want to send mails from people in that categorie to the folder you drop a mail on...
Jos, you are right. Normally people get into contact privately or in business. For these common cases it should be quick and easy to maintain the filter rules. If there are private and business mail adresses AND if the mails should go into two different folders, the user may need to modify the rules manually. But the gerneral case should be somewhat fast to do, e.g.: 1) Receive a new mail 2) Assign mail address to Contact / create new contact for that address 3) Re-Filter mail
This reminds me of an idea I had a few months ago. The whole process of email filtering could be done using supervised learning (basically, the same way a bayes spam filter such as bogofilter works). Meaning, the user would initially just assign a few mails to folders (or at some later point in time create a new folder and move some messages to it), and the system would learn similarities between the messages in the folders based on their headers. Then, when a new message arrives, the system would do a classification and move the new message to the best matching folder. Of course, the user should be given a way to correct classification errors once in a while. This scheme would be extremely easy to understand even for novice users, since all they have to do is set "examples" for the system to learn from. I've had a very good experience with the bogofilter (only once in a while it yields a false negative, and I've had no false positives at all for about two years), so I can't think of a reason why a similar scheme for regular email filtering shouldn't work. What do you think?
*** Bug 137296 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 185701 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 194142 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Reassigning to kmail2
Thank you for the bug report. As this report hasn't seen any changes in 5 years or more, we ask if you can please confirm that the issue still persists. If this bug is no longer persisting or relevant please change the status to resolved.
Still valid after 18 years.