Thunderbird Message Filter Import/Export

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by Robert Lear on Oct. 21, 2008 · permalink

A great tool! (If the import was to Merge instead of Replace, I'm sure someone else would think that was a stupid design; you can't please everyone.)

My need: I have 20 or so filters, with some of them having 20-40 conditions. I would like to have these larger filters sorted. I have tried editing the filter.dat file in several editors (Word, Writer, Notepad, Wordpad, etc.). I then extract each condition (OR) at the beginning of a line, manually sort each filter on the condition, write them back out and import the edited file. Unfortunately, T-bird takes a dim view of this, either as soon as the restart completes or on first view of the filters. The message is that the file MsgFilter.dat file is unreadable.

I have tried several combinations of format types (.doc, .txt, .rtf, etc.) and cr/lf, cr, lf, etc., without success.

I would very happy with this approach, even more so if your extension could start each OR condition on a new line for easy sorting. But until I understand how to edit the file, I'm stuck. Do I need to go to a hex editor to see what is going on and process accordingly?

Any help would be most appreciated.