Please add regular expressions and/or wildcards to thunderbird mail filters

[rconstan]

Please add regex and/or wildcards to Thunderbird filters. I know its been suggested and requested and discussed on forums hundreds of times, yet Mozilla has never added either option. One of the most powerful anti-spam and anti-scam filtering possible involves filtering by IP address ranges in the "Received" message headers, which we can all see plainly when we examine a message with "all headers" view selected. Quite often if you use a "whois" lookup on the IP addresses in SPAM mail, you'll quickly find the offending IP in a range of addresses from a country you have no interest in hearing from. But trying to "Match" ranges of IP addresses without REGEX (or at least wildcards) is nearly impossible. Yes, I know there is a 3rd party program called "FiltaQuilla", but it simply does not work. I've been back and fourth with the authors and developers of and that add-on it is incapable of seeing the email header Mozilla calls "Received", as it simply does not exists in the header database (manually adding it in the system registry does not help). There are no easy work around to this. Please add this capability.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[LoveTacos]

I use  Message filters to organize my emails.

One problem is that we can't use the "*" (everything before or anything after) or the "?" (any character) in the field that is being used to create the filter. 

Ex: I would like to be able to move every message from "*@*.ebay.com" in the  From email address field

emails like those here will all be transferred to the assigned folder in the filter

"u305xxbla_ltn@members.ebay.com ", "support@ebay.com" or "sales@ebay.com"

[spiderman1369]

Yes, a PCRE flavor of robust RegEx Filters would be awesome. Also allow filters to be shared amongst community so people aren't recreating the wheel continuously. This will help clean-up inboxes and dump spam where it belongs.

[ThiloteE]

Your example does not really require the `@`. Anyway, what you could do is to try to install the filtaquilla addon (https://quickfilters.quickfolders.org/filtaquilla.html) and try the "header regexp match" search term. Unfortunately, multiple "dialects" of Regular expressions (RegEx) exist and I am not completely sure which one Thunderbird uses. You would need to look that up and check the proper syntax.

The other (probably easier) workaround would be to create multiple filters like this:

1. Filter (match any of)
filter condition: From > ends with > ebay.com
filter action: tag > x

2. Filter (match all of)
filter condition A: tag > x
filter condition B: from > contains > support
action: move

This one obviously will take words into account that are written in front of the @, but it's also a little inaccurate, as it will create false positives. Also, it will require you to constantly update your filters, once you find new e-mails not triggering the filter.

The easiest workaround though, will be to simply use a single filter with "From > ends with > ebay.com", the action "move" and nothing else, but that one will also create false positives.

[tophercat]

It would be awesome to be able to use regular expressions, or at least some sort of wildcards, in searches and filters in Thunderbird. That would go for all text-based search criteria, so headers, message body, etc.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[MattAuSupport]

Have you tried the addon?  https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/

[tophercat]

I haven't really started to explore Tbird addons yet, but I will certainly look at ones that feature regex searching. That said, I'm more inclined to use saved searches than filters to sort messages, so filtaquilla might not be exactly what I'm looking for. I'm just starting to explore using Thunderbird as a daily driver after many (many) years of using more old school text-only mail apps with features, like baked-in regex searches, that are targeted more toward 'power users.' So, my suggestion is really just a first impression reaction. If there's a way to get what I'm looking for through an addon, that's great.

[treacle]

Being able to use regular expressions in Message Filters, without using an add on, would be very usefull

[wsm]

I changed this from a discussion item to an idea.

Now I am going to merge this to https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/please-add-regular-expressions-and-or-wildcards-to-thunderbird/....  

[wsm]

I am going to merge this to https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/please-add-regular-expressions-and-or-wildcards-to-thunderbird/... which is just about filters.  

Searching would be a separate idea.